P1: GCV 0521835356agg.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 February 1, 2004 14:36 Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS Daniel C. Hallin Paolo Mancini University of California Universit`adiPerugia P1: GCV 0521835356agg.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 February 1, 2004 14:36 published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon´ 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini 2004 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2004 Printed in the United States of America Typefaces Minion 11/13 pt. and Centaur System LATEX2ε [TB] A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available ISBN 0 521 83535 6 hardback ISBN 0 521 54308 8 paperback P1: GCV 0521835356agg.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 February 1, 2004 14:36 Contents List of Figures and Tables page viii List of Acronyms xi Preface xiii 1 Introduction 1 Part I. Concepts and Models 2 Comparing Media Systems 21 3 The Political Context of Media Systems 46 4 Media and Political Systems, and the Question of Differentiation 66 Part II. The Three Models 5 The Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model 89 6 The North/Central European or Democratic Corporatist Model 143 7 The North Atlantic or Liberal Model 198 Part III. The Future of the Three Models 8 The Forces and Limits of Homogenization 251 9 Conclusion 296 Bibliography 307 Index 329 vii P1: GCV 0521835356agg.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 February 1, 2004 14:36 List of Figures and Tables FIGURES 3.1 Relation Between Literacy Rate in 1890 and Newspaper Circulation in 2000 page 64 4.1 Relation of Individual Cases to the Three Models 70 6.1 Left-Right Positions of German and Swedish Media 182 TABLES 2.1 Newspaper Sales per 1,000 Adult Population, 2000 23 2.2 Gender Differences in Newspaper Reach, 2000 24 2.3 Proportion of Public Watching or Reading News Every Day, and the Ratio of Television to Newspaper Consumption, European Union Countries, 2001 25 2.4 Public Broadcasting Systems 42 3.1 Consensus vs. Majoritarian Politics 51 3.2 Effective Number of Political Parties and Index of Polarization, Average Figures for 1945–89 60 4.1 The Three Models: Media System Characteristics 67 4.2 The Three Models: Political System Characteristics 68 5.1 Functions of Paragraphs in U.S. and French News Stories 99 5.2 Party-Press Parallelism in Italian Newspaper Readership, 1996 102 5.3 Party-Press Parallelism in Spanish Newspaper Readership, 1993 105 6.1 Political Activity among Norwegian Journalists, 1970s 157 6.2 Political Affiliations of Danish Newspapers 179 6.3 Contrasting Stories on Immigration in the Danish Press 184 viii P1: GCV 0521835356agg.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 February 1, 2004 14:36 List of Figures and Tables 7.1 Party-Press Parallelism in British Newspaper Readership 213 7.2 Contrasting Stories on Immigration in the British Press 214 7.3 Percent of U.S. Cities with Competing Daily Newspapers 220 9.1 Pattern of Variation in Four Media System Dimensions 299 ix P1: GCV 0521835356agg.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 February 1, 2004 14:36 List of Acronyms AGI Agencia Giornalistica Italia ASNE American Society of Newspaper Editors BBC British Broadcasting Corporation CBC Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CSA Conseil Superieur de l’Audiovisuel DNVP German National People’sParty DR Danmarks Radio EBU European Broadcasting Union ECU European Currency Unit EU European Union FCC Federal Communications Commission IBA Independent Broadcasting Authority ITC Independent Television Commission ITV Independent Television IU Izquierda Unida NOS Dutch Broadcasting Foundation NUJ National Union of Journalists ORTF Office de Radiodiffusion-Tel´ evision´ Franc¸aise PASOK Panhellenic Socialist Party of Greece PBS Public Broadcasting System PCC Press Complaints Commission PCI Partido Comunista Italiana PP Partido Popular PSOE Spanish Socialist Workers Party RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana RTF Radio Tel´ evision´ Franc¸aise xi P1: GCV 0521835356agg.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 February 1, 2004 14:36 List of Acronyms RTVE Grupo Radio Television´ Espanola˜ TUC Trades Union Congress WAN World Association of Newspapers WTO World Trade Organization xii P1: GLB/KAF/KAA P2: kaf 0521835356int.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 January 20, 2004 14:50 ONE 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 pur- poses 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 lim- ited progress in addressing this kind of question. Though there have been attempts, particularly since the 1970s, to push the field in the di- rection of comparative analysis, such a research tradition remains essen- tially in its infancy.1 We 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 confine ourselves to the devel- oped capitalist democracies of Western Europe and North America. We attempt to identify the major variations that have developed in West- ern democracies in the structure and political role of the news me- dia, and to explore some ideas about how to account for these varia- tions and think about their consequences for democratic politics. We place our primary focus on the relation between media systems and political systems, and therefore emphasize the analysis of journalism and the news media, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, media policy and law. 1 Some important statements of this ambition in communication include Blumler, McLeod, and Rosengren (1992), Blumler and Gurevitch (1995), and Curran and Park (2000). 1 P1: GLB/KAF/KAA P2: kaf 0521835356int.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 January 20, 2004 14:50 Comparing Media Systems 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 such as “Why is the press as it is?” we must turn to comparative analysis. The role of comparative analysis in social theory can be under- stood 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 pre- vailed in that country were universal. This, at least, is true in the countries with the most-developed media scholarship, including the United States, Britain, France, and 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 atten- tion to aspects of any media system, including our own, that “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 re- vealed 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 2 Basic works on the comparative method, beyond those cited in the text, include Marsh (1964), Przeworski and Teune (1970), Tilly (1984), Dogan and Pelassy (1990), and Collier (1993). 2 P1: GLB/KAF/KAA P2: kaf 0521835356int.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 January 20, 2004 14:50 Introduction example, the highly interpretive character of American compared with Italian TV news, a characteristic that contradicted common assump- tions about “objective” journalism in the American system (Hallin and Mancini 1984). Comparative analysis makes it possible to notice things we did not noticeandthereforehadnotconceptualized,anditalsoforcesustoclarify the scope and applicability of the concepts we do employ.