10 - Partisan Polyvalence

Summary

Generalizing about the media is fraught with risks, especially if we move beyond the West to make statements about the world as a whole. For example, newspaper sales are generally said to be falling, as traditional print media struggle to compete with broadcasting and online media; local newspapers are considered to be struggling everywhere. Actually, it turns out that everywhere does not really mean everywhere. Newspaper circulations are healthy in many low- and middle-income countries across Asia and Latin America: According to the World Association of Newspapers, in 2007 sales increased by 12 percent in Brazil, 11 percent in India, and 7 percent in Argentina. A thriving local newspaper sector in such countries might seem to reflect strong communities and emerging democracy – but not necessarily. I met a friend in Bangkok who had just come back from Nan, a sleepy province in northern Thailand. He reported that Nan has four local newspapers, a surprisingly large number. Yet when he made inquiries, he discovered that they were all in the extortion business, digging the dirt on local politicians and businesspeople, and asking to be paid not to publish it. The Committee for the Protection of Journalists reports numerous killings of local journalists in developing countries – the Philippines currently ranks number 5. These murders of journalists are terrible abuses of human rights and democracy, but some of the victims were also small-town gangsters. And so it goes: Lurking behind every nice, simple, and attractive generalization are some messy and uncomfortable realities that do not get in the way unless we talk about them. I talk about some of them in this chapter.

Like Hallin and Mancini (2004b: 10), I have always considered Four Theories of the Press (Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm, 1956) to be something of a “horror movie zombie” stalking the world of media studies. Like them, I would concur with Nerone (1995) that the four theories are ultimately predicated on one starting point, classical liberalism, and are deeply rooted in a North American understanding of how the world works. I am convinced that any conceptualization of media too firmly rooted, like Four Theories, in crude ideas of regime types will lack sufficient nuance to capture the ambiguous and even contradictory roles performed by different media actors. Comparing Media Systems moves beyond such simplistic understandings, embracing Europe – including “Mediterranean” Europe – as well as North America. It is a great improvement on previous attempts to model the ways media work and offers a broadly convincing analysis of Western media paradigms. But where does it leave those of us who work on media in the rest of the world? Picking over the models themselves – Liberal, Democratic Corporatist, and Mediterranean – from a non-Western perspective is relatively straightforward. Details can be tweaked here and there, or a fourth model proposed, which might be essentially a variant on one of the others.