Americanization, Globalization and Secularization: Understanding the Convergence of Media Systems and Political Communication in the U.S. and Western Europe

by

Daniel C. Hallin

University of California, San Diego

and

Paolo Mancini

Università degli Studi di Perugia

Prepared for F. Esser and B. Pfetsch, Eds., Politische Kommunikationsforschung in internationalen Vergleich [Political Communication in Comparative Perspective]. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

Americanization, Globalization and Secularization: Understanding the Convergence of Media Systems and Political Communication in the U.S. and Western Europe

Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

This chapter analyzes the tendency for media systems worldwide to become increasingly homogeneous, with cultural and structural differences among nation states disappearing in favor of a global pattern of commercial media, journalistic professionalism and marketing-oriented politics. The discussion focuses on the example of Europe and North America, and on journalism and political communication. The analysis centers around two distinctions. First, a distinction can be drawn between external and internal explanations for changes in media and political communications: some explanations focus on the influence of the American media practices globalization more generally--this tradition of scholarship originated with the cultural imperialism literature; others focus on social changes internal to European nations. A distinction can also be drawn between theories which see media system change as an autonomous factor driving the broader process of social change--which could be called modernization or secularization--and those which see other processes of social changes as causally prior.

Americanization, Globalization and Secularization: Understanding the Convergence of Media Systems and Political Communication in the U.S. and Western Europe

by

Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

A powerful trend is clearly underway in the direction of greater similarity in the way the public sphere is structured across the world. In their products, in their professional practices and cultures, in their systems of relationships with other political and social institutions, media systems across the world are becoming increasingly alike. Political systems, meanwile, are becoming increasingly similar in the patterns of communication they incorporate.

We will explore this trend toward global homogenization of media systems and the public sphere, focusing particularly on the relations between media and political systems, and on the industrialized, capitalist democracies of Western Europe and North America. We will organize our discussion of how to account for this trend around two pairs of contrasting perspectives. Much of the literature on homogenization sees it in terms of Americanization or globalization: that is, in terms of forces external to the national social and political systems in which media systems were previously rooted. Other explanations focus on changes internal to these national systems. An important distinction can also be made between mediacentric perspectives, for which changes in media systems are autonomous developments which then influence political and social systems, and those which see social and political changes as causally prior to media system change.

Americanization and Globalization

The phenomenon of homogenization in world media systems was first emphasized as a scholarly issue in the cultural imperialism literature of the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural imperialism theory was obviously a theory of external influence (e.g. Schiller, 1969, 1976; Boyd-Barret, 1977). It saw homogenization as a result of cultural domination. The global expansion of mass media industries based in advanced capitalist countries and particularly in the United States resulted in the destruction of local cultures and their replacement by a single, standardized set of cultural forms tied to consumer capitalism and American political hegemony. Europe occupied an ambiguous middle position in this literature. European media were seen as part of the dominant Western cultural influence on developing countries; at the same time, the early cultural imperialism literature also raised the issue of U.S. influence over European culture.

The idea that media system change can be understood as a process of Americanization is still very much alive, and there is obviously much truth to it. American programming still dominates many media markets, in some industries--film for example--perhaps as much now as ever before. And at a deeper level, moreover, in terms of the kinds of media structures and practices that are emerging and the direction of change in the relation of media to other social institutions, it is reasonable to say that homogenization is to a significant degree a convergence of world media toward forms that first evolved in the U.S. The U.S. was once almost alone among industrialized countries in its system of commercial broadcasting; now commercial broadcasting is becoming the norm. The model of information-oriented, politically-neutral professionalism that has prevailed in the U.S. and to a somewhat lesser degree in Britain increasingly dominates the news media worldwide. The personalized, media-centered forms of election campaigning, using techniques similar to consumer product marketing, that again were pioneered in the U.S., similarly are becoming more and more common in European politics (Swanson & Mancini, 1996; Butler & Ranney, 1992).

It is clear too that direct cultural diffusion from the United States has played a role in these changes. American concepts of journalistic professionalism and press freedom based in privately owned media, for example, were actively spread by the government- sponsored "free press crusade" of the early Cold War period (Blanchard, 1986), and reinforced in later years by a variety of cultural influences, ranging from professional education and academic research in U.S. universities and private research institutes (Tunstall, 1977; Mancini, 2000), to internationally circulated media like the Herald-Tribune and CNN and products of popular culture like the film All the President's Men.[1] American campaign consultants are active in Europe (Plasser, 2000), as are American firms that advise television companies on the production of commercially-successful news broadcasts. One important recent illustration of American influence is the transformation of the Labor party in Britain under Tony Blair, which invoved a shift in the party's structure toward one more suitable for a media-based campaign, drawing on Clinton's earlier experience (Butler & Kavanaugh, 1997; Jones, 1997).

Recent scholarship has tended to subsume the kinds of influences originally identified by cultural imperialism theory under the broader and more complex concept of globalization. From this point of view, attention is focused not on a single country to blame for exporting and imposing a single social imagery, but rather on a complex set of interactions and inter-dependencies among different countries and their systems of communications (Thompson, 1995; Tomlinson, 1991). The concept of globalization is clearly more adequate in that it makes it possible to integrate the analysis of external sources of influence with the internal processes of social change which, as we shall see, are clearly essential to understanding change in European media and public sphere. It is certainly possible to affirm that many of the structures and routines which dominate an increasingly homogeneous global communication system were tried and tested in the United States. Their diffusion around the world cannot, however, be attributed to the action of a single agent. It has not been a unilateral process: where European countries have borrowed American innovations, they have done so for reasons rooted in their own economic and political processes, often modifying them in significant ways (Negrine & Papathanassopoulos, 1996; Farrell & Webb, 2000).

Two important elements of globalization clearly rooted within Europe--though also influenced by developments in worldwide political economy--should be noted here. One is European integration. With the Television without Frontiers Directive of 1989, the European Union embarked deliberately on an attempt to create a common broadcasting market, an objective which required harmonization of regulatory regimes across the continent. This and other elements of European law have undercut the earlier multiplicity of communication policies and patterns of relationship between the media and national political systems. Closely related is a strong trend toward internationalization of media ownership. The search for ever greater amounts of capital to invest in new technologies and to compete in liberalized international markets has produced a strong trend toward the development of multinational media corporations (Herman & McChesney, 1997). Clearly such corporations, to achieve economies of scale and scope and to take advantage of market integration, tend to internationalize both products and production and distribution processes, contributing further to the homogenization of strategies and professional practices. The extra-national circulation of professionalism, the integration of company management within the same group and the universal circulation of the same products can only weaken those national characteristics that, at least in part, had made economic and entrepreneurial systems of individual countries different from each other.

Modernization and Secularization

The term "Modernization" has often been proposed as an alternative to "Americaniza-tion," in an effort to stress that changes in political communication in Europe are not created purely exogenous forces, but are rooted in a process of social change endogenous to European society. The term "modernization" is itself problematic. It carries an evolutionist connotation, for one thing, an implicit assumption that change is to be seen as "progress," necessary and unilinear. It also lumps together many dimensions of change--technological, cultural political, economic--which need to be distinguished analytically if we are to be clear about the forces at work, even if we conclude in the end that these different dimensions are interrelated.

One important component of the modernization perspective is the idea that importance of group solidarity and the centrality of organized social groups is giving way to greater individualism. The European political order, according to this view, was at one time organized around social institutions--political parties, trade unions and churches, among others--rooted in ideological commitments and group loyalties related to broad social divisions, especially those of social class and religion. The ties of individuals to these groups was central both to their identity and to their material well-being, and the institutions connected with these groups were central to the organization of the public sphere. If political communication is being transformed, this cannot be understood without reference to the collapse of this old political order, and its displacement by a more fragmented and individualistic society. Another term that might help to capture the nature of the change is "secularization." Just as the Church is no longer able to control the socialization or behavior of populations now attracted to values and institutions that transcend the field of faith, so parties, trade unions and other institutions that structured the political order Lipset & Rokkan (1967) once described as essentially "frozen," now are not able to hegemonize the course of a citizen's community life.

The "de-pillarization" of Dutch society is perhaps the classic example of this change. So-called pillarization indicated the subdivision of Dutch society into several religious and political subcommunities; the socialization of Dutch citizens was carried out within these communities, and they structured both political life and the mass media. "These pillars have their own institutions: schools, universities, political parties, hospitals, sport clubs and other association. It goes without saying that these various pillars also wanted to have their own daily newspapers and periodicals (Neiuwenhuis, 1992: 197)." "Each member of each minority could operate within the walls of his or her own confessional pillar, which had its own schools, social facilities, unions, political organizations and institutions" (McQuail, 1993: 76). By the 1970s, "the average Dutch citizen had become primarily an individual consumer rather than a follower of a particular religious or political sector" (Nieuwenhuis,1992: 207).

Italian society has gone through a similar change, although at a lower level of institutionalization. For years political subcultures had highly developed institutions of socialization, including education, communication and entertainment. In the Italian case, this mainly applied to the Communist and Catholic subcultures (Bagnasco, 1977; Marletti, 1999). The first was built on the basis of political and ideological membership, the second on political and religious membership. Both had ramified structures that organized the participation of citizens in community life, often in a clientelist or semi-clientelist fashion. The two subcultures had their own organizations for entertainment and sports and were connected with educational structures; many of their structures served as vehicles of communication. Over the years, these subcultures progressively weakened, surrendering most of their functions to other institutions, including the mass media.

European societies differed in the extent to which different social groups developed their own organizations, as well as in the exact form of the social cleavages and their institutional expressions. This was one reason political and media systems differed across the continent. At the same time, most were characterized in one way or another by a rooting of the party and media systems in organized social groups, and this set them apart from the more individualistic, market-oriented American political and media system.

The "secularization" of European society has been accompanied by a transformation of political life, which has been extensively documented by political scientists. This transformation involves the decline of the mass party, ideologically-identified and rooted in distinct social groups, and its replacement by the "catch-all" or "electoral-professional party," oriented not primarily toward the representation of a groups or ideologies but toward the conquest of electoral market share. This is sometimes interpreted as a "decline of party," though some analysts dispute this interpretation, arguing that professional electoral parties are actually more effective than earlier mass parties at conquering and wielding political power. It does seem to be correct, however, that the stable psychological and sociological bonds that once existed between parties and citizens have been weakened in this transformation. Party membership has declined (as have church and trade union membership). So has party loyalty, measured either by identification with political parties or by partisan consistency in electoral behavior, at least in many cases (in the U.S. case, actually, partisan consistence in voting and political attitudes declined from the 1950s to 1970s, and then subsequently strengthened [Jabobson, 2001]). Voting turnout has declined in many countries. "When partisanship was closely tied to class and religion, the conjoint of social and political identifications provided a very strong incentive for party identifiers to turn out. These linkages, however, have withered in recent years. . ." (Dalton & Wattenberg, 2000: 66). The "grass-roots" political organizations that once tied parties to citizens have atrophied, while professional staffs concerned with media and marketing have grown. Individual leaders have become increasingly important to the appeal of parties, while ideology and group loyalties have become less so. The shift in Italy from the mass politics of the Communist and Christian Democratic parties to Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, a party created essentially as a vehicle for marketing a single political leader, is a particularly striking symbol of this change, but a similar trend toward "presidentialization" can be seen, in differeing degrees, in other cases as well--with Blair in Britain, for example, or Shröeder in Germany.

A number of social processes, many of them interrelated, have been identified as possible causes of this transformation of political life. In the sphere of economics, the manufacturing industries in which traditional working class organizations were rooted have declined, displaced by the growing service sector. Perhaps most fundamentally, European economies have expanded, and it seems likely that increased affluence and the growth of the consumer society resulted in an increasing emphasis on individual economic success rather than political defense of group interests. A contrasting, though not necessarily incompatible interpretation of the effect of economic growth is Ingelhart's (1977) argument that affluence and the stabilization of liberal democracy led to the rise of "post-materialist values." This change in political culture is seen as undercutting the ideological divisions on which the old party system was based and making individuals increasingly unwilling to defer to the leadership of traditional organizations. It may in turn be related to the rise of new social movements raising issues which cut across traditional party lines.

These same factors cited by Ingelhart--affluence and the consolidation of parliamentary democracy within the context of a capitalist economy, may also be resposible for a marked decine in ideological polarization. There is considerable evidence that the ideological differences between political parties has decreased (Mair, 1997: 133). This is probably connected with the acceptance of the broad outlines of the welfare state by conservative parties and of capitalism and liberal democracy by the parties of the left; an important symbol of the shift would be the "historic compromise" which incorporated the Communist party into the division of political power in Italy in the 1970s. The literature on "plural" societies like the Netherlands, where the various subcultures had separate institutions at the grass-roots level, often notes that the leaderships of these communities became accustomed to cooperation and compromise at the level of national state institutions.

Some accounts of change in European policical systems also point to increased education, which might result in voters seeking information independently rather than relying on the leadership of political parties. In some accounts this is connected with a shift from voting based on party and group loyalty to issue-based voting. Some also mention that patronage systems have declined, in part because of economic integration and the pressures it puts on government budgets, undercutting the ability of parties to provide material incentives to their active supporters (Kitschelt, 2000). Finally, the rise of new demographic groups as a result of immigration may have weakened the old order, both because the new populations are not integrated into traditional group-based structures and because tensions over immigration lead to the defection of traditional adherents.

Whatever the exact connections among these forces, and whatever the exact weights of their importance, these processes of change have taken place to a significant degree in all of Western Europe. To a very significant degree they probably account for the shift toward catch-all political parties marketing themselves to individual voters without strong ties to collective organizations. In this sense, they probably account to a large extent for the "Americanization" of European political communication.

The Role of the Media

It is clear that the mass media play an important role in this process of political change; indeed, the increasing centrality of mass media to the process of political communication is central to the very definition of "Americanization" or "modernization" in most discussions of political change. Does media system change play an independent causal role in this process? Or is it simply one effect of the processes of social change noted above? Most accounts of political change in Europe list media system change as a significant and independent factor:

. . . [N]ew technologies and . . . changes in the mass media . . . have enabled party leaders to appeal directly to voters and thereby undermined the need for organizational networks. . . (Mair, 1997: 39.)

Increasingly . . . media have taken over [information and oversight functions] because they are considered unbiased providers of information and because electronic media have created more convenient and pervasive delivery systems. . . . the growing availability of political information through the media has reduced the costs of making informed decisions. (Flanagan & Dalton: 240-42.)

The mass media are assuming many of the information functions that political parties once controlled. Instead of learning about an election at a campaign rally or from party canvassers, the mass media have become the primary source of campaign information. Furthermore, the political parties have apparently changed their behavior in response to the expansion of mass media. There has been a tendency for political parties to decrease their investments in neighborhood canvassing, rallies, and other direct contact activities, and devote more attention to campaigning through the media. (Dalton & Wattenberg, 2000: 11-12.)

The growth of electronic media, especially television, has tended to diminish the role of the party. The electronic media also make it easier to communicate events and issues through personalities. . . (Dalton, McAllister & Wattenberg, 2000: 55.)

In most cases, however, media system change is not analyzed with the same rigor as other variables, either conceptually or empirically, and we are left with many ambiguities about what exactly has changed in media systems and how those changes are related to the wider historical process.

"Expansion of the Media"

In what sense has the media system "expanded"? Certainly, it has not done so in a unilinear manner: there are various counter trends during the late 20th century, the most significant of which is probably the reduction in the number of newspapers which characterizes most countries, resulting in a disappearance of newspaper competition in many markets. Nevertheless, it is accurate in many ways to say that there has been an expansion of media in the post-World War II period. There are fewer newspapers but they are bigger enterprises, with more pages; the number of journalists has increased; and, most dramatically, new forms of media have evolved. The most important form of media expansion is clearly the growth of electronic media. It is very plausible that unprecedented reach of electronic media, their ability to carry messages to the entire population simultaneously, across social and political divisions, changed political communication in important ways, encouraging political parties and other organizations to abandon earlier forms of communication in favor of centralized use of mass media as well as to target audiences outside their original social bases. (Other new information technologies may also have encouraged the shift toward more professionalized and individualized patterns of political communication, including the development of polling, direct mail marketing and eventually the internet.) It is also very likely that the increased reach of electronic media, combined with increased assertiveness of journalists and with commercialization--both of which will be discussed below--have made the media themselves an increasingly central social institution, to a significant extent displacing churches, parties, trade unions and other traditional organizations of "civil society" as the central means by which individuals are connected to the wider social and political world.

One specific version of the argument that expansion of the media leads to political change is the hypothesis that a "growing availability of political information through the media" makes individual citizens less dependent on party and group leadership. This hypothesis involves particularly tricky issues, and only limited empirical evidence is available. That more political information is available in the abstract is certainly true. But how much political information is actually taken in by the "average" citizen is an extremely complex issue. It is certainly plausible that the rise of electronic media increased the flow of political information, both through their wide reach and their relatively accessible forms of presentation. This may have been especially important in Southern Europe where newspaper circulation is limited. On the other hand, many have argued that the commercialization of media--which we will take up in detail below--creates a powerful conter-trend, pushing political content out of the media. Empirical evidence on this point is fragmentary and inconclusive.[2] It may be that the flow of political information did increase up to a point--perhaps in the 1980s--and since has diminished; it may also be that the downward tendency is just beginning. A strong emphasis on public affairs content was clearly one of the distinctive characteristics of European public service broadcasting. Its most important manifestation was the placement of substantial news broadcasts in the heart of prime time, often simultaneously on all available channels. Commercialization and the multiplication of channels is clearly eroding this emphaisis--though political content does migrate into new, more entertainment-oriented forms--talk shows and the like--with uncertain consequences for the net flow of political ideas and information.

Television and Secularization

To understand the impact of electronic media, of course, we need to look beyond their mere existence to their social organization. The electronic media were organized originally in Europe under political authority. The exact form of governance of broadcasting varied considerably from one system to another, but certainly in many systems political parties had considerable influence on broadcasting systems, as did, in certain cases what German media law (which gives them a particularly important place) rewfers to as "socially relevant groups." One might, therefore, have expected electronic media to reinforce rather than to undercut the traditional role of political parties and organized social groups.

One account of the impact of television is provided by Wigbold (1979), focusing on the particularly interesting Dutch case. Broadcasting was organized in the Netherlands following the pillarized model that applied to the press, education and other cultural institutions. Each of the different communities of Dutch society had a separate broadcasting organization, just as they had traditionally had separate schools and newspapers. One might have thought that by extending their reach to a powerful new medium, the pillars would have become even more entrenched in Dutch society. Nevertheless, depillarization clearly did coincide historically with the rise of television. And Wigbold makes the argument that Dutch television "destroyed its own foundations, rooted as they were in the society [it] helped to change" (230).

His argument has three parts. First, he argues that despite the existence of separate broadcasting organizations, television broke down the separateness of the pillars:

Television was bound to have a tremendous influence in a country where not only the doors of the living room were closed to strangers but also the doors of schoolrooms, union meetings, youth hostels, football grounds and dancing schools. . . . It confronted the masses with views, ideas and opinions from which they had been isolated. . . [T]here was no way out, no hiding place, except by the difficult expedient of switching the set off. Television viewers could not even switch to a second channel, because there wasn't one. . . Catholics discovered that Socialists were not the dangerous atheists they had been warned about, Liberals had to conclude that orthodox Protestants were not the bigots they were supposed to be. (201)

Second, he argues that television journalists shifted substantially in the early 1960s toward a more independent and critical attitude toward the leaders of established institutions, toward whom they had previously deferred.

Third, a new broadcasting organization (TROS) was founded at the end of the 1960s which was the broadcasting equivalent of the catch-all party: originating from a pirate broadcaster, it provided light entertainment and "was the very negation of the broadcasting system based . . . on giving broadcast time to groups that had something to say" (225).

The Dutch case is unique in many ways, of course. Still, it seems likely that each of these factors had close parallels across most of Europe: the role of television as a common ground, the development of critical journalism, not only in television but in the media generally, and commercialization.

Television as a common ground. Across Europe, broadcasting was organized under political authority, and often incorporated principles of proportional representation drawn from the political world. Nevertheless, it is quite plausible that it served as a social and political common ground and had some role in weakening separate ideological subcultures. It was highly centralized, with one to three channels (of television and of radio) in most of the post World War II period. Most programming was aimed at the entire public, regardless of group boundaries. The production of news was generally bound by the principle of political neutrality, which separated broadcast journalism from the traditions of partisan commentary which often characterized the print press (in the Dutch case, while the pillarized broadcasting organizations produced public affairs broadcasts, news, like sports, was produced by the umbrella organization NOS). Television entertainment, meanwhile, provided a common set of cultural references, whose impact on political culture would be very difficult to document, but certainly might have been quite significant.

The journalist as "critical expert." In both Western Europe and the United States, there was a significant shift in the 1960s and 1970s from a form of journalism that was relatively deferential toward established elites and institutions, toward a relatively more active, independent form of journalism which Padioleau (1985), in a comparative study of Le Monde and The Washington Post, termed "critical expertise." This shift took place both in electronic and print media. In the case of Swedish television, for example, Djerff-Pierre (2000) writes:

The journalist culture of 1965-1985 embraced a new ideal of news journalism, that of critical scrutiny. The dominant approach was now oriented toward exerting influence, both vis-à-vis institutions and the public at large. . . [J]ournalists sought to bridge information gaps in society and to equip their audiences for active citizenship and democratic participation. . . . Journalists also had the ambition to scrutinize the actions of policy makers and to influence both public debate on social and political issues and the policies made by public institutions. (254)

This shift varied in form and extent, but seems to have been quite generalized across national boundaries. It involved the creation of a journalistic discourse that was distinct from the discourse of parties and politicians, and also a conception of the journalist as representative of a generalized public opinion that cuts across the lines of political parties and social groups. Critical professional journalists, as Neveu (in press) puts it, "[S]pot blunders in strategy, mistakes in governing, from an in-depth knowledge of issues. They question politicians in the name of public opinion and its requests -- identified 'objectively' by the polls--or in the name of suprapolitical values such as morality, modernity or the European spirit."

Why did this change take place? Surely it was to a significant extent rooted in the broader social and political changes discussed above. If, for example, affluence, political stability and increasing educational levels led to a general cultural shift toward "post-materialist" values of participation and free expression, the rise of critical expertise in journalism might be seen as one effect of this deeper social change. If catch-all parties were already being formed in the 1950s--Kirchheimer noted their rise in 1966--the discourse of a general public opinion made up of individualized voters committed to "suprapolitical" values, which would be crucial to the perspective of critical professionalism in journalism, may pre-date the latter. Even if the rise of critical professionalism in the media was in part an effect or reflection of other social forces, however, it seems likely that at some point it began to accelerate and amplify them. It is also possible that a number of factors internal to the media system itself contributed to the shift in the political role of journalism. These include:

1. Increased educational levels of journalists, leading to more sophisticated forms of analysis, in part by the incorporation into journalism of critical perspectives from the social sciences and humanities;

2. Increased size of news organizations, leading to greater specialization and greater resources for news-gathering and news processing;

3. Internal development of the growing professional community of journalism, which increasingly develops its own standards of practice;

4. Development of new technologies of information processing which 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 (in press) argues that opinion polling gave journalists increased authority to question 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, commercial newspapers have grown in strength; these newspapers, like their American counterparts, tend to be "catch-all" papers, defining themselves as politically neutral (though generally 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 to what extent the shift from party to commercial newspapers reflects the social and political "secularization" discussed above 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 expanding 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.

The most dramatic change, however, has clearly been the commercialization of European broadcasting. There is no doubt that starting with the end of the Second World War a process of progressive weakening of the relatively separate national cultures had already commenced, faced with the growing global flow of messages, products and institutional forms, mainly coming from the United States. An important restraint to this flow, however, and one which also had consequences for other means of communication, was the prevalence of the public service broadcasting across Europe. Public service broadcasting was regulated by norms and values firmly rooted in the distinct cultural and political paradigms that prevailed in the different nation states of Europe; "sustaining and renewing the society's characteristic cultural capital and cement" was indeed one of the central missions of public service broadcasting (Blumler, 1992: 11). In important ways the public service system limited the social and political impact of television, creating continuity between television culture and the established culture of the wider society.

Regarding Italy, Bettetini (1985) used the expression “pedagogizing palimpsest” (palinsesto pedagogizzante) to describe how the primary objective of television programming was education and propagation, creating, among other things, a strong link between television language and the language of traditional literature. Therefore, the great television events of that period were mostly television transpositions of the most important works of Italian and foreign literature, preserving continuity with existing traditions. Another equally important example is that of France where the extremely strong “prescriptive” nature of the public television service tended in a similar way to favor the defense of national identity. French cultural and political traditions were in perfect harmony with the ideal of the “grandeur” of General de Gaulle that permeated French society -- and no less French broadcasting -- of those years (Vedel-Bourdon, 1993). In a similar way, each system strongly tied television to established political institutions.

Commercialization is now dramatically undercutting this system, disrupting the connection between broadcasting and national systems, submitting electronic media to globalizing forces similar to those that prevail in other industries, and spreading cultural forms and professional practices, including those of electronic journalism, that developed originally in the United States, though they now evolve in an increasingly global way. Many of the characteristics commonly attributed to television in discussions of the transformation of political communication--personalization, for example, and the tendency to focus on the experience and perspective of the "common citizen" (Neveu, 1999)--are characteristics of commercial media, more than of television as a technology, and were developed only to a limited extent under the public service system (Hallin & 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 commercial television fully emerged. As the case of TROS in the Netherlands suggests, however, commercial forces were beginning to make themselves 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 périfériques 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 radio 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 on forces internal to Europe--including a deliberate effort to make Europe a "common market" integrated 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 parties, 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 rooted in technical requirements of the media, the evolution of journalistic professionalism and commercial imperatives. At the same time, deeper social forces are clearly at work, and the changing role of the media can only be understood in the context of a broader process of social change.

The global expansion of the market society has clearly diminished the differences between nationally-distinct systems of media and political communication. It is hard to say how far this process of convergence might go. It could lead to complete homogenization, to the point that national differences, including differences between the U.S. and Europe essentially vanish. It also may be that convergence will stop short of complete homegenization. There are, certainly, structural and cultural differences between the U.S. and Europe that may prove to be of continued relevence. These include parliamentarism and proportional representation in European political systems, the tradition of the welfare state, and differences in traditions on media regulation, which mean, for example, that many European countries still ban paid political advertising in electronic media--not a small difference from the American media environment.

The implications of these changes for democracy and the public sphere are as complex as the process of change itself. We cannot explore them fully here. One hint at their complexity can be illustrated by a return to the Dutch example, in which the old regime was undermined, in Wigbold's view, simultaneously by the rise of critical professionalism--by an intensified questioning of established authority that was part of the process of secularization and connected to the rise of new social movements--and by "Trossification," that is, by a flight in to the privatism of the consumer society, that was in some sense the other face of the same process of social change. The public sphere thus became more open in certain ways--less bound by the limits imposed by the established political subcommunities and their leaderships--and in other ways less so, as commercial imperatives have imposed new constraints.

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[1] Rieffel (1984) for example, notes the influence of the Herald-Tribune on French journalists (114 ), and recounts that L'Express changed its format in 1964 "à l'imitation de périodiques américaines" (33).

[2] Some of the--conflicting--evidence on commercialization of broadcasting is summarized in Brants & Siune 1988. Information--again conflicting--on changing political content in the British press can be found in McLachlan and Golding, 2000 and Rooney, 2000.