1

Introduction

"In the simplest terms," Siebert, Peterson and Schramm wrote in Four Theories of the Press (1956), "the question behind this book is, why is the press as it is? Why does it apparently serve different purposes and appear in widely different forms in different countries? Why, for example, is the press of the Soviet Union so different from our own, and the press of Argentina, so different from that of Great Britain?"

Nearly half a century later the field of communication has made limited progress in addressing this kind of question. Though there have been attempts, particularly since the 1970s, to push the field in the direction of comparative analysis, such a research tradition remains essentially in its infancy.[1] We will attempt in this book to propose some tentative answers to the questions posed by Siebert, Peterson and Schramm--though not on such a grand scale: we will confine ourselves to the developed capitalist democracies of Western Europe and North America. We will attempt to identify the major variations that have developed in Western democracies in the structure and political role of the news media, and to explore some ideas about how to account for these variations and think about their consequences for democratic politics. We will place our primary focus on the relation between media systems and political systems, and will therefore emphasize the analysis of journalism and the news media, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, media policy and law.

Why Comparative Analysis?

It is worth dwelling for a moment on one of the most basic insights of Siebert, Peterson and Schramm: the idea that if we want to address a question like "Why is the press as it is?" we must turn to comparative analysis. The role of comparative analysis in social theory can be understood in terms of two basic functions: its role in concept formation and clarification and its role in causal inference.[2]

Comparative analysis is valuable in social investigation, in the first place, because it sensitizes us to variation and to similarity, and this can contribute powerfully to concept-formation and to the refinement of our conceptual apparatus. Most of the literature on the media is highly ethnocentric, in the sense that it refers only to the experience of a single country, yet is written in general terms, as though the model that prevailed in that country were universal. This, at least, is true in the countries with the most developed media scholarship, including the U.S., Britain, France, Germany; in countries with less developed traditions of media research, another pattern often emerges --a tendency to borrow the literature of other countries--usually the Anglo-American or the French literature--and to treat that borrowed literature as though it could be applied unproblematically anywhere. We believe this style of research has often held media researchers back from even posing the question, "Why are the media as they are?" Important aspects of media systems are assumed to be "natural," or in some cases are so familiar that they are not perceived at all. Because it "denaturalizes" a media system that is so familiar to us, comparison forces us to conceptualize more clearly what aspects of that system actually require explanation. In that sense comparative analysis, as Blumler and Gurevitch (1975: 76) say, has the "capacity to render the invisible visible," to draw our attention to aspects of any media system, including our own, which "may be taken for granted and difficult to detect when the focus is on only one national case." Our own comparative work began with the experience of exactly this type of insight. Comparing U.S. and Italian TV news in the early 1980s, familiar patterns of news construction, which we had to some extent assumed were the natural form of TV news, were revealed to us as products of a particular system. We were thus forced to notice and to try to account for many things we had passed over, for example, the highly interpretive character of American compared with Italian TV news, a characteristic which contradicted common assumptions about "objective" journalism in the American system (Hallin & Mancini 1984).

Comparative analysis makes it possible to notice things we did not notice and therefore had not conceptualized, and it also forces us to clarify the scope and applicability of the concepts we do employ: comparative studies, as Bendix (1963: 535) puts it "provide an important check on the generalizations implicit" in our concepts and forces us to clarify the limits of their application. Bendix gave the example of "urbanization" which sociologists had assumed to be so closely associated with secularism and Western forms of individualism that the latter could be treated as part of the very notion of urbanism--a generalization which, he argued, fell apart when we looked at India or other non-western societies. In a similar way we will try to clarify the conceptual definitions of a number of key concepts in media studies--journalistic professionalization, for example--and to use comparative analysis to discover which aspects of those concepts really do vary together and which do not.

If comparison can sensitize us to variation, it can also sensitize us to similarity, and that too can force us to think more clearly about how we might explain media systems. In the U.S., for example, media coverage of politicians has become increasingly negative over the past few decades. We typically explain that change by reference to historical events like Vietnam and Watergate, as well as changes in the conduct of election campaigns. This trend is not, however, unique to the United States. Indeed, it is virtually universal across Western democracies; the generality of this change, of course, suggests that particular historical events internal to the U.S. are not an adequate explanation. Comparative analysis, in other words can protect us from false generalizations, as Bendix says, but can also encourage us to move from overly particular explanations to more general ones where this is appropriate.

Of course, comparative analysis does not automatically bring these benefits. It can iself be ethnocentric, imposing on diverse systems a framework that reflects the point of view of one of these--though this is probably most true of work which, like Four Theories of the Press, purports to be comparative but is not in fact based on comparative analysis. We will argue later in this chapter that ethnocentrism has been intensified in the field of communication by the strongly normative character of much theory. Comparison can indeed be entcentris; we believe, however, the comparative method properly applied provides a basis for systematic critique of work that falls into these patterns of overgeneralization and conceptual narrowness.

The second reason comparison is important in social investigation is that it allows us in many cases to test hypotheses about the interrelationships among social phenomena. "We have only one means of demonstrating that one phenomenon is the cause of another: it is to compare the cases where they are simultaneously present or absent," wrote Émile Durkheim (1965) in The Rules of Sociological Method. This has become the standard methodology in much of the social sciences, particularly among those interested in analyzing social phenomena at the system level, where variation will often not exist in a single-country study. There are, of course, many epistemological debates surrounding the effort to find "sociological rules" in Durkheim's sense. Some believe social theory should follow the natural sciences in the search for laws that are "always and everywhere the case;" others that the generalizations of social theory will necessarily be relative to particular systems and historical contexts. Some believe explanation requires a clear identification of cause and effect, "dependent" and "independent" variable, others think in terms of identifying patterns of co-evolution of social phenomena which might not always be separated into cause and effect. In the field of communication, those who do analysis at the system level often tend to be skeptical of "positivism"; the "positivists" in the field tend to be concentrated among people working at the individual level. For many years empirical research in communication was almost synonymous with the media effects paradigm, which was concerned not with larger media structures but with the effects of particular messages on individual attitudes and beliefs; this may be one reason systematic use of comparative analysis has developed slowly. We believe, however, that it is not necessary to adopt strong claims of the identity between natural and social science to find comparative analysis useful in sorting out relationships between media systems and their social and political settings.

Let us take one example here. Jeffrey Alexander, in an unusual and very interesting attempt to offer a comparative framework for the analysis of the news media, poses the question of how to explain the particular strength of autonomous journalistic professionalism in the United States. One hypothesis he offers is that "it is extremely significant that no labor papers tied to working class parties emerged on a mass scale in the United States" (1981: 31). He goes on to contrast U.S. press history with that of France and Britain, and advances the claim that the absence of a labor press in the U.S. explains the development of autonomous professionalism. We will discuss Alexander's important theoretical framework in greater detail in subsequent chapters. As for the particular hypothesis about the labor press, comparative analysis allows us fairly easily to dismiss it, once we go beyond the comparison between the U.S. and France: there are a number of cases in Europe where a strong labor press and strong professional autonomy of journalists both developed; indeed we will argue that this pattern is typical of most of Northern Europe. What other factors might account for journalistic autonomy we will take up later (as well as a number of questions about how to define it).

The use of comparative analysis for causal inference belongs to a relatively advanced stage in the process of analysis. Our own study is primarily exploratory in character, using comparative analysis to serve the first cluster of purposes outlined above, for conceptual clarification and theory development, much more than for the second, for hypothesis testing and causal inference. Our purpose here is to develop a framework for comparing media systems and a set of hypotheses about how they are linked structurally and historically to the development of the political system, but we do not claim to have tested those hypotheses here, in part because of severe limitations of data underscored below.

Comparative analysis, particularly of the broad synthetic sort we are attempting here, is extremely valuable but difficult to do well, especially when the state of the field is relatively primitive. It is risky to generalize across many nations, whose media systems, histories and political cultures we cannot know with equal depth. This is why we have undertaken this project as a collaboration between an American and a European. Some might wonder why we did not try to organize a broader collaboration. There are, of course, many practical difficulties in such an enterprise, but the fundamental reason is that our purpose in this book is to produce a cogent theoretical framework--or at least to move toward one. Multinational collaborations in our field have often tended to fall back on the least common denominator in terms of theory, or to leave theoretical differences unresolved. We hope that scholars will find our general arguments interesting enough to excuse occasional errors or lack of subtlety in dealing with particular cases. In comparative research, much of the real collaboration is of course indirect. Our study builds on a growing body of scholarship across Europe and North America, and we hope that many of these scholars will eventually carry the ideas proposed in this volume much further than we can do here.

Scope of the Study

This study covers the media systems of the U.S., Canada and most of Western Europe, excluding only very small countries (e.g. Luxembourg, much of whose media system is actually directed toward audiences in neighboring countries.) Our study is thus based on a "most similar systems" design. As Lijphart (1971) stresses, one of the greatest problems in comparative analysis is the problem of "many variables, few cases." One of the principal means of solving that problems, he notes, is to focus on a set of relatively comparable cases, in which the number of relevant variables will be reduced. This approach will reduce the number of cases as well; but in a field like communication, where the existing literature and available data are limited, this is often a benefit as well, in the sense that it is impossible for analysts competently to handle more than a limited number of cases. One of the problems of Four Theories of the Press, as we noted above, is that its scope is so grand that it is almost inevitably superficial: like a photo with too much contrast, it obscures too much of the detail we need to see.[3] By limiting ourselves to North America and Western Europe we are dealing with systems which have relatively comparable levels of economic development and much common culture and political history. This is a limitation, obviously: the models developed here will not apply without considerable adaptation to most other areas of the world, though we hope they will be useful to scholars working on other regions as points of reference against which other models can be constructed. One advvantage of this focus is the fact that the media models that prevail in Western Europe and North America tend to be the dominant models globally; understanding their logic and evolution is therefore likely to be of some use to scholars of other regions not only as an example of how to conduct comparative research but also because these models have actually influenced the development of other systems.

Our study, as mentioned above, is an exploratory one, and the main purpose of the "most similar systems" design is not to hold certain variables constant for purposes of demonstrating causality, but to permit careful development of concepts that can be used for further comparative analysis, as well as hypotheses about their interrelations. The fact that it is an exploratory study also means that the geographical definition of its scope is in some ways arbitrary: we did not already have a theoretical framework which could provide the basis for selection of cases. Instead we followed the familiar strategy of limiting the study to a region on the assumption that this would result in a reasonably comparable set of cases. "Comparability," as Lijphart (1971: 689) says, "is not inherent in any given area, but it is more likely in an area than in a randomly selected set of countries." The area approach also made the study more manageable in a practical sense --we were able to visit the countries more easily, for instance, and to take advantage of the relatively large amount of comparable data compiled on European media systems. We could probably have added Australia and New Zealand--whose historical connections make them very similar to Western European countries--to our study without making the conceptual framework significantly more complex. We suspect, however, most other cases we might have added would have introduced important new variables, and strained our ability to master the relevant literatures and present the resultant framework in a coherent way. In Chapter 4 we introduce a triangular drawing on which each of our cases is represented in relation to three media system models; any significant multiplication of cases would probably have made such a two-dimensional representation impossible!

The desire to "reduce the property space of the analysis," in Lijphart's terms, is also reflected in our decision to focus primarily on news media and media regulation. A comparative analysis of media systems certainly could include much more about cultural industries--film, music and television and other entertainment, about telecommunication, public relations and a number of other areas. But this would involve other literatures and require very different sets of concepts, and we will not try to take it on here.

The Legacy of Four Theories of the Press

Since we began with Four Theories of the Press, a work which remains remarkably influential around the world as an attempt to lay out a broad framework for comparative analysis of the news media, it makes sense to follow Siebert, Peterson and Schramm's argument a bit further.[4] "The thesis of this volume," they continue, "is that the press always takes on the form and coloration of the social and political structures within which it operates. Especially, it reflects the system of social control whereby the relations of individuals and institutions are adjusted. We believe that an understanding of these aspects of society is basic to any systematic understanding of the press" (1-2). Here again, we think the problem is well-posed. We shall follow the agenda set out by Siebert, Peterson and Schramm in attempting to show how different media models are rooted in broader differences of political and economic structure: we will argue that one cannot understand the news media without understanding the nature of the state, the system of political parties, the pattern of relations between economic and political interests and the development of civil society, among other elements of social structure.

On one point, we will leave matters a bit more open than the authors of Four Theories of the Press. Note that Siebert, Peterson and Schramm seem to assume that the media will always be the "dependent variable" in relation to the "system of social control," which it "reflects." In this sense, their formulation is ironically similar to a traditional Marxist base and superstructure theory (though as we shall see in a moment they quickly stand Marx on his head). In many cases it may be reasonable to assume that the media system essentially "reflects" other aspects of social structure--the party system, for example. But there is good evidence that media institutions have an impact of their own on other social structures.

There is also clearly historical variation in the degree to which they are reflective or independently influential, and many scholars have argued that there is an important trend in the direction of greater media influence, particularly in relation to the political system. The belief that the media have become an important "exogenous" variable affecting other political institutions is one reason scholars in comparative politics have begun to pay attention to media institutions they previously ignored. It is worth noting that, just as communication scholars have paid little attention to comparative analysis, scholars of comparative politics have paid little attention to the media. One can search the index of the classic works on political parties and find virtually nothing on the press or media, even though politicians have certainly been preoccupied by--and occupied in--the latter as long as political parties have existed, and even though those classic works often define parties as communicative institutions (Deutsch, 1966; Sartori, 1976), a theoretical perspective which would seem to suggest they would have an important pattern of relationships with other institutions of communication.

Today this is beginning to change, due in part to a growing feeling that the media are less "reflective" than they once were. Sometimes this change may actually be exaggerated. Media scholars--following the tradition of McLuhan--often tend to have a professional bias toward overstressing the independent influence of media. And scholars from other fields sometimes do so as well, perhaps out of a sense that the media are "overstepping their bounds" as they become more powerful relative to other sorts of instituions. Bourdieu's recent work On Television (1998) might be an example here, as well as much speculation in comparative politics about "videocracy." In Chapter 8, we will address the question of the reciprocal influences of the media and the political system, and try to sort out some of the arguments about the relative incluence of media sysatem change in shaping contemporary European political systems.

Siebert, Peterson and Schramm go on:

To see the differences between press systems in full perspective, then, one must look at the social systems in which the press functions. To see the social systems in their true relationship to the press, one has to look at certain basic beliefs and assumptions which the society holds: the nature of man, the nature of society and the state, the relation of man to the state, and the nature of knowledge and truth. Thus, in the last analysis the difference between press systems is one of philosophy, and this book is about the philosophical and political rationales or theories which lie behind the different kinds of press we have in the world today (p. 2).

At this point, we part company with Siebert, Peterson and Schramm. To be sure, we too believe that political culture is important, and we will try to show how differences in media systems are connected with socially-shared conceptions about state and society, objectivity, the public interest, and the like. But the focus on "philosophies" of the press--or as one might also call them, "ideologies" of the press--points to what we see as a key failing of Four Theories of the Press. Siebert, Peterson and Schramm did not, in fact, analyze empirically the relation between media systems and social systems. They looked neither at the actual functioning of media systems nor that of the social systems in which they operated, but only at the "rationales or theories" by which those systems legitimated themselves. "In arguing that 'in the last instance the difference between press systems is one of philosophy' the book disregards the material existence of the media" (Nerone 1995: 23).

Nor was their analysis actually comparative. In part, this was because of the background of the Cold War: because it is so preoccupied with the dichotomy between the contending U.S. and Soviet models, Four Theories of the Press has little room for the actual diversity of world media systems. In tracing the origins of the four theories, for example, Siebert, Peterson and Schramm make reference almost exclusively to three countries--the U.S., to which they trace the libertarian and social responsibility theories, Britain, to which they trace both the authoritarian and, along with the U.S., the libertarian theories, and the Soviet Union; all the models, moreover, are really, to quote Nerone (1995: 21) again, "defined . . . from within one of the four theories--classical liberalism." The four theories are of limited use in understanding the European experience. One could say that Western Europe has combined the libertarian model (manifested in the relatively unregulated commercial and party press and the tradition of advocacy journalism), the social responsibility model (public broadcasting, right of reply laws, press subsidies, press councils) and the authoritarian tradition (Gaullist state broadcasting or the British Official Secrets Act, as well as the controls exercised in periods of real dictatorship); one could probably say that any system combines these elements in some way. But this is far too thin a framework to begin a real comparative analysis.

Four Theories of the Press has stalked the landscape of media studies like a horror-movie zombie for decades beyond its natural lifetime. We think it is time to give it a decent burial and move on to the development of more sophisticated models based on real comparative analysis.[5]

Media System Models

One reason Four Theories of the Press has proved so influential over so many years is that there is a lot of appeal in the idea that the world's media systems can be classified using a small number of simple, discreet models. Is it possible to replace the four theories with a new set of models, better-grounded empirically but sharing something of the parsimony of the originals? Only with great caution. We will in fact introduce three media system models. These will be elaborated more fully in the following chapter, but briefly they are the Liberal Model, which prevails across the Britain, Ireland and North America, the Democratic Corporatist Model, which prevails across northern continental Europe, and the Polarized Pluralist Model, which prevails in the Mediterranean countries of southern Europe. The Liberal Model is characterized by a relative dominance of market mechanisms and of commercial media; the Democratic Corporatist Model by a historical coexistence of commercial media and media tied to organized social and political groups, and by a relatively active but legally limited role of the state; and the Polarized Pluralist Model by integration of the media into party politics, weaker historical development of commercial media, and a strong role of the state. We will try to show that the characteristics that define these models are interrelated, that they result from meaningful pattern of historical development, and do not merely cooccur accidentally. We will also use these models to organize the discussion of the media systems of individual countries, trying to show how each country's media system does and does not fit these patterns.

Many qualifications must be introduced as soon as we begin to use these models. They are ideal types, and the media systems of individual countries fit them only roughly. There is considerable variation among countries which we will be grouping together in our discussion of these models. The British and American media systems (which we will discuss as examples of the Liberal Model) are in fact quite different in many ways, even though it is common to talk about the Anglo-American model of journalism as though it were singular. Italy, with a "consensus" political system and a full half century of democratic government is quite different from Spain, with a majoritarian system and a much later transition to democracy, though they both are close to the Polarized Pluralist Model in many characteristics. We will discuss Germany in relation to the Democratic Corporatist model, though it is quite different from the small democracies which represent the classic cases of that model. We will discuss France in relation to the Polarized Pluralist Model of the Mediterranean countries, but we shall see that it something of a mixed case between the Polarized Pluralist and Democratic Corporatist Models, as Britain is a mixed case between the Liberal and Democratic Corporatist Models. In part we hope that the models will be useful precisely in bringing these variations to light. It should be stressed that their primary purpose is not classification of individual systems, but the identification of characteristic patterns of relationship between system characteristics.

It is also important to note that media systems are not homogeneous. They are often characterized by a complex coexistence of media operating according to different principles. "In most countries," as McQuail (1994: 133), puts it, "the media do not constitute any single 'system,' with a single purpose or philosophy, but are composed of many separate, overlapping, often inconsistent elements, with appropriate differences of normative expectation and actual regulation." In Britain, for example, it could be said that there have historically been three distinct cultures of journalism, sharing some common characteristics, to be sure, but diverging sharply on others--the journalism of the tabloid press, that of the quality press, and that of broadcasting. Our models are in this way quite different from those of Four Theories of the Press. They describe not a common philosophy but an interrelated system (McQuail declines to use the term "system," but its use does not really imply homogeneity) which may involve a characteristic division of labor or even a characteristic conflict between media principles.

Finally, the models should not be understood as describing static systems. The media systems we are describing here have been in a process of continual change, and were very different in 1960 than in 1990. If Britain has historically had three journalistic cultures (others actually can be identified if we go back further in history) they are much less distinct today than they were twenty years ago. The models, we hope, will be seen not as describing a set of fixed characteristics, but as identifying some of the underlying systemic relationships which help us to understand these changes.

We will pay considerable attention to history in this analysis. Media institutions evolve over time; at each step of their evolution past events and institutional patterns inherited from earlier periods influence the direction they take; we shall see, for example, that there is a strong correlation between literacy rates in 1890 and newspaper circulation rates today, and that where mass circulation newspapers exist they almost always trace their origin to this era. North (1990) has called this "path dependence." Path dependence means only that the past has a powerful influence: it does not mean present or future institutions must essentially resemble those of the past, nor that change is absent; we shall see that the media systems of Western Europe and North America have in fact changed very substantially in recent years. We shall see in particular that globalization and commercialization of the media has led to considerable convergence of media systems.

One question we cannot answer is whether the distinct models we identify here, which emerged in Western democracies in the mid-twentieth century, will eventually disappear altogether. Media systems have historically been rooted in the institutions of the nation state, in part because of their close relationship to the political world. National differentiation of media systems is clearly diminishing; whether that process of convergence will stop at a certain point or continue until national differentiation becomes irrelevant we cannot yet know.

Do We Need Normative Theories of the Media?

The field of communication, and most particularly the study of journalism, has always been heavily normative in character. This is due in part to its rooting in professional education, where it is more important to reflect on what journalism should be than to analyze in detail what and why it is. Thus a book like The World's Great Dailies : Profiles of Fifty Newspapers (Merrill & Fisher 1980) obviously includes not those newspapers most typical of journalism in their respective countries, nor those with the highest circulation, but "great" newspapers, those which are in some sense models of professional practice. Four Theories of the Press is also clearly normative in character (its subtitle is "The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Communist Concepts of what the Press Should Be and Do"), judging world press systems in terms of their distance from the liberal ideal of a neutral, "watchdog" press free from state interference. Much subsequent comparative analysis, especially in the Unites States, was tied to modernization theory, which similarly compared world press systems against the liberal ideal, only with underdevelopment rather than totalitarianism as the opposing pole.[6]

The liberal model enshrined in normative theory, based primarily on the American and to a somewhat lesser extent the British experience, has become so widely diffused around the world--partly, as Blanchard (1986) points out, as a result of campaign mounted by the U.S. government and press in the early years of the Cold War--that other conceptions of journalism often are not clearly conceptualized even by their own practitioners. Even within the U.S., the normative ideal of the neutral, independent watchdog leads to blind spots in journalists' understanding of what they do, obscuring many functions--that, for example of celebrating consensus values (Hallin 1986: 116-8)--which fall outside the normative model. The gap between ideal and reality is far greater in countries like Italy or Spain, where journalists will express allegiance to the liberal model of neutrality and objectivity, while the actual practice of journalism is deeply rooted in partisan advocacy traditions. In scholarship, too, the Anglo-American liberal model has been conceptualized much more fully--even by its critics--than other media system models. And there is a strong tendency for comparative discussions to privilege normative judgements, often, like Four Theories of the Press, in a rather Manichaean mode. Again, this is true of both defenders of the liberal model--Alexander (1981), for example--and critics, like Chalaby (1998), who recounts French and British media history as a shift toward what for him is the anti-ideal of depoliticized commercial media.

We are interested here not in measuring media systems against a normative ideal, but in analyzing their historical development as institutions within particular social settings. We want to understand why they developed in the particular ways that they did, what roles they actually play in political, social and economic life, what patterns of relationship they have with other social institutions. Our models of journalism are intended as empirical, not normative models.

This does not mean that we are uninterested in normative questions, nor, certainly, that we mean to adopt an attitude of functionalist relativism, assuming that any media institutions that exist must ipso facto be assumed to perform positive functions for the society as a whole. We will try to show, in fact, that comparative analysis can be extremely useful in addressing the kinds of normative questions that legitimately concern communication scholars. Does commercialization support or undercut the independence of the media? Is the diversity of voices in a plural society better represented in a media system with external or internal pluralism--that is, which news media that represent distinct political orientations, or news media that seek to report the news in a "balanced" way? Which is more responsive to new voices emerging in society--a professionalized commercial press or one more closely tied to the political system? Comparative analysis can help us to address these kinds of questions, first, by giving us a clearer sense of the range of different kinds of institutional arrangements that have evolved to deal with the problems of communication in a democratic society, and second by allowing us to assess the actual consequences of these institutional structures for the values we consider important--diversity, openness and responsiveness, independence, accuracy and completeness of information.

We suspect that in most cases comparative analysis would suggest complex answers to these kinds of questions--that is, it would help us specify under what circumstances commercialization leads to media independence, under what circumstances it undercuts it, and under what circumstances other institutional arrangements might be more conducive to the realization of that value. And we will insist in addressing normative questions that they can never be answered in a purely abstract and universal way. It is not clear that media models which "work" in one context would also "work" in another very different one: it is not clear that one could have transplanted American neutral commercial journalism, for instance, or British tabloid journalism, to 1950s Netherlands or 1970s Italy and expect it to have had any credibility to audiences or any relevance to democratic politics as it was actually conducted in those contexts. Similarly, we may judge party newspapers to be of little relevance to the democratic process in Western Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but this does not mean we can dismiss their significance in the different political context in which they flourished some decades ago--or, perhaps, deny that in some other political system they might play an important role today. Any judgement we make about a media system has to be based on a clear understanding of its social context--of such elements as the divisions existing within society, the political process by which they were (or were not) resolved and the prevailing patterns of political belief.

Limitations of Data

"Writing in 1975, nobody could claim to be able to paint an assured portrait of the field of investigation to be discussed in this essay"--so wrote Blumler and Gurevitch (1975[1995]) in an early effort to develop a framework for comparative analysis in political communication. "It is not only that few political communication studies have yet been mounted with a comparative focus. More to the point, there is [no] settled view of what such studies should be concerned with. . . (p. 59)." Things are a little better today. A number of genuinely comparative studies have been done, and scholarly communication across national boundaries has increased substantially (this is manifested, for example, in the creation of the European Journal of Communication in 1985). Nevertheless, the basic situation is as Blumler and Gurevitch described it in 1975: limitations of comparative data impose severe restrictions on our ability to draw any firm conclusions about the relations between media and social systems.

In some ways, comparative research in communication may be inherently harder than in some fields. Those who study comparative politics, for example, can take advantage of the structured choices that characterize electoral politics to generate quantitative data that are relatively easy to compare across systems. It is easy enough to come up with comparable quantitative data on things like newspaper circulation, state subsidies to the press or (slightly more difficult) ownership concentration, though even when dealing with very concrete kinds of information--whether particular countries had right of reply laws, for example, or whether they allowed paid political advertising--we were surprised at how difficult it could be to find information on all the countries in our study, and often found contradictions in the published literature or between that literature and scholars we consulted in each country. The situation is far more difficult with something like the day-to-day flow of political discourse in the media, the significance of which is often dependent on subtle cultural cues, which may be inherently harder to study comparatively than much of the subject matter of comparative politics, and certainly to quantify. We would stress here that comparative research by no means requires quantitative data, though such data can often be extremely useful. To a large extent, what we need in communication is more qualitative case studies, based for example in discourse analysis or field observation--case studies carried out with a theoretical focus that gives them broader significance for the comparative understanding of media systems.[7] This brings us back to the fundamental problem identified by Blumler and Gurevitch in 1975: the fact that we are still so unclear on what to look for when we do comparative research on media systems. It is toward this conceptual problem that our book is directed. Given the limitations of the existing research, we cannot claim to test most of the hypotheses we raise here. Neither will we attempt to fill the gap of comparative research. Our analysis is based primarily existing published sources, and we make only very limited attempts at new empirical research. It is our intent instead to propose a theoretical synthesis and a framework for comparative research on the media and political systems.

Plan of the Book

The remainder of the book is divided into three parts. Part I introduces the theoretical framework. In Chapter 2 we propose a set of dimensions for comparing media systems, and address a number conceptual issues which arise in relation to those dimensions. In Chapter 3 we focus on characteristics of the political system and of socio-political history which we believe are important to understanding the development of media systems, and propose a number of hypotheses about links between political and media system characteristics. In Chapter 4 we introduce the three models, then go on to discuss the relation of these models to more general perspectives in social theory, particularly differentiation theory--which, we will argue, is implicit in much communication theory which assumes the Liberal Model as a norm--and critics of differentiation theory, particularly Habermas and Bourdieu.

Part II discusses the three models in detail; the Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model in Chapter 5; the North/Central European or Democratic Corporatist Model in Chapter 6; and the North Atlantic or Liberal Model in Chapter 7. Here we examine the historical development and the structural and cultural logic of each system, consider how particular cases fit the general model, and attempt to establish the plausibility of the framework we propose in Part I.

Part III concludes our study by focusing on the transformations currently under way in media systems in Western Europe and North America. Chapter 8 focuses on homogenization or convergence of media systems, addressing the forces of change which are eroding the differences among three media systems we explore here--and generally pushing them in the direction of the Liberal Model--as well as the limits of these forces. Chapter 8 also returns to the theoretical debate over differentiation, to consider to what extent the language of "modernization" connected to differentiation theory can serve as a framework for understanding media system convergence. In the concluding chapter we assess what we have learned from this study, and what we propose for the future of comparative analysis of media and political systems.

---

[1] Some important statements of this ambition in communication include Blumler & Gurevitch 1995, Blumler, McLeod & Rosengren 1992, Curran & Park 2000.

[2] Basic works on the comparative method, beyond those cited in the text, include Tilly (1984), Dogan & Pelassy (1990), Przeworski and Teune (1970), Collier (1993), Marsh (1964).

[3] Another example is Martin & Chaudhary (1983), which attempts a global analysis of media systems, dividing the world into "three ideological systems," the Western, Communist and Third World--a noble attempt to cover the whole world, but obviously one that involves huge generalizations within these groups. There are also collections which impose little in the way of a common analytical framework, e.g. Nimmo & Mansfield (1982).

[4] Many variations of the Siebert, Peterson and Schramm schema have been proposed over the years, for example by Hachten (1996), Altschull (1995) and Picard (1985), who proposes to add a model which corresponds more or less to what we will call the Democratic Corporatist Model. McQuail (1994: 131-2) summarizes a number of the revisions of Four Theories.

[5] A discussion of the historical background of the book and further critical analysis can be found in Nerone (1995).

[6] This is true, for example, of the studies summarized in Edelstein, 1982. See the critical discussion of comparative research in Hardt, 1988.

[7] On the role of case studies in comparative analysis see Lijphart (1971); George (1979), George and McKeowan (1985).