COMPARATIVE NEWS MEDIA SYSTEMS: NEW DIRECTIONS IN RESEARCH

Abstract

Long hampered by American chauvinism, comparative research on news media is nally coming out of its long slumber. Presuming the inferiority of journalism as practiced anywhere other than in the land of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, U.S. researchers for many years were little inclined to explore conditions elsewhere. More surprisingly, this U.S.-centric worldview was often embraced by legions of Europeans and others who rejected their own journalistic traditions in favor of an American ideal that was often ill-suited to their own country (Mancini 2000). Promoted by the State Department and private foundations (Wrenn 2008), U.S. notions of a marketdriven “free press” were also long reinforced by the classic textbook, Four Theories of the Press (Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm 1956). Four Theories celebrated the U.S. and U.K. “liberal” and “social responsibility” models, reviled the “authoritarian” and “Soviet-communist” alternatives, and simply ignored the possibility of anything in between. In short, one had to choose: the “American Way,” or the Highway (to the Gulag). Clearly, this stark dichotomy effectively removed from view the range of western European democratic press traditions, as well as the diverse panoply of non-Western media. Fortunately, in recent years, a growing tide of cross-national comparative research has begun to challenge this American-centric narrative. After the pioneering essay by Blumler and Gurevitch (1975), new journals emerged, such as the European Journal of Communication and the International Journal of Press/Politics, which emphasized comparative research. Important anthologies were edited by Blumler, McLeod, and Rosengren (1992) and Curran and Park (2000), the latter attempting to more fully incorporate non-Western media, and important comparative case studies were conducted by Alexander (1981), Hallin and Mancini (1984), Chalaby (1996), asard and Bennett (1997), Esser (1998, 1999), Benson (2000), Ferree et al. (2002),Deuze (2002), Donsbach and Patterson (2004), Stromback and Dimitrova (2006), among many others. In 2004, Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini’s Comparing Media Systems presented a landmark synthesis of this emerging research field, replacing the American-centric normative approach of Four Theories with an original framework for open-ended empirical research. In a very short period of time, Comparing Media Systems has become an essential point of reference for comparative news media research, but as Hallin and Mancini themselves concede, it is far from the last word. Their classication of national media systems into broader regional political/journalistic “models” – a North Atlantic “liberal” model, a Northern European “democratic corporatist” model, and a southern European “polarized pluralist” model – is admittedly not fully able to capture the diversity of media within and across each model. Likewise, their identification of four key factors shaping news production (to be discussed below), while immensely useful, needs to be interrogated in relation to other theoretical traditions, such as the sociology of news, new institutionalism, and field theory. Finally, important questions scarcely explored by Hallin and Mancini are now arguably the most crucial: first, the extent to which even an “expanded” understanding of Western media (beyond the American paradigm) is adequate to fully account for the wide variety of media found in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, and second, whether the internet is dissolving or exacerbating or creating new kinds of crossnational differences. These are of course big questions, and I do not intend to settle them in this chapter. Instead, I will focus on the challenge of employing comparative research for testing hypotheses about the effects of system-level variables on news content and form, and limit myself to a few concluding remarks about the “new frontiers” of research on non-Western media and internet journalism. In my view, comparative research needs to be more self-conscious about seeking out national cases that vary on system-level variables (such as concentration of ownership, political party system, specic media policies, etc.) rather than on the basis of regional or topical interest. Because the French and U.S. news media differ so systematically – in their relations to political and economic power, and in their journalistic professional traditions – many communication scholars and sociologists have found this comparison to be especially fruitful in theory-building (see, Alexander 1981; Lemieux and Schmalzbauer 2000; Brossard et al. 2004; Starr 2004). For this reason, my own research has focused on FrenchAmerican comparisons, and I will draw upon some of my recent ndings to illustrate the theory-building potential (and limitations) of comparative research. There are some positive signs that journalists are paying increasing attention to this research (see, Nordensen 2007), providing them with new ideas about reporting practices and ways to resist excessive market or governmental pressures. Moreover, to the extent that publics and policy-makers can understand better the factors that shape journalistic production, they are in a better position to demand changes that will help journalism better serve the needs of democratic societies. Comparative research is now poised, more than ever, to honestly and directly answer such questions.