Page 58 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

journalism of critical perspectives from the social sciences and
humanities;
(2) Increased size of news organizations, leading to greater specializa-
tionandgreaterresourcesfornewsgatheringandnewsprocessing;
(3) Internal development of the growing professional community
of journalism, which increasingly develops its own standards of
practice; and
(4) Development of new technologies of information processing that
increase the power of journalists as information producers. This
includes, of course, the visual techniques of television, as well as
many developments in printing and in information technology.
One interesting example would be polling: Neveu (2002) argues
that opinion polling gave journalists increased authority to ques-
tion public officials, whose claims to represent the public they can
now independently assess.

COMMERCIALIZATION
The most powerful force for homogenization and globalization within
the media system, we believe, is commercialization. Commercialization
has transformed both print and electronic media in Europe, though the
change is especially dramatic in the latter case. In the case of print media,
the post–World War II period is characterized by a gradual decline of
the party press and general separation of newspapers from their earlier
rooting in the world of politics. As party papers have declined, com-
mercial newspapers have grown in strength; these newspapers, similar
to their American counterparts, tend to be catch-all papers, defining
themselves as politically neutral (thoughgenerally liberal and centrist in
ideological orientation) and committed to an informational model of
journalism. As Curran (1991) and Chalaby (1996) have pointed out, the
style of neutral professionalism allows commercial media to maximize
their audience, and commercialization clearly tends to favor this style.
It is an interesting question as to what extent the shift from party to
commercial newspapers reflects the social and political secularization
previously discussed and to what extent it results from forces internal to
the media system. Did the party press decline because readers were less
committed politically, or was it destroyed by competition from the ex-
panding electronic media and commercial press – the commercial press
being fed by the expanding consumer society and consequent growth of
advertising expenditure? No doubt both processes were at work.

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