Page 60 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

perspective of the “common citizen” (Neveu 1999) – are characteristics
of commercial media, more than of television as a technology, and were
developedonlytoalimitedextentunderthepublicservicesystem(Hallin
and Mancini 1984).
The commercial “deluge,” as many discussions have characterized it,
did not come to Europe in full force until the 1980s, and this certainly
suggests that we should be careful about exaggerating the social impact
of commercial television. Secularization was well underway before com-
mercial television fully emerged. As the case of TROS in the Netherlands
suggests,however,commercialforceswerebeginningtomakethemselves
felt in a variety of ways before the 1980s: through import of American
programs and imitation of American practices, through advertising in
some European systems, through pirate and transborder broadcasting,
including the important case of the p´erif´eriques in France, and with
the breakdown of the public service monopoly in Italy at the end of
the 1970s. It is certainly plausible that if Europe was becoming more
of an individualist, consumer society in the 1960s, television and ra-
dio did play some role, despite the limits imposed by the public service
system.

CONCLUSION
One way to synthesize the many influences discussed in this chapter
would be to say that it is driven at the deepest level by the growth of a
secularized market society. This is the core of what is generally referred
to as modernization, and the deeper meaning of Americanization. It is a
global process, and certainly does involve diffusion of cultural and social
practices from one country to another, and specifically from America to
Europe. At the same time it is clearly rooted in forces internal to Europe –
including a deliberate effort to make Europe a “common market” inte-
grated with the world economy – and internal to each individual nation
state. The mass media play an important role in this process, and one of
its principal effects is to shift social and political power to a significant
extent from the “aggregating” institutions of an earlier era – political par-
ties, churches, trade unions, and other “peak organizations” – toward
the mass media. It involves a shift, in Mazzoleni’s (1987) terms, from
“political logic” in the process of communication to “media logic,” the
latter being a complex phenomenon shaped by technical requirements of
the media, the evolution of journalistic professionalism and commercial

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