Preface

Summary

We don't remember exactly when the idea of this book was born. Probably at the moment we were finishing our first joint enterprise, “Speaking of the President,” which was published in 1984, we already had a strong sense that this kind of research was extremely promising and that we should try to do it more systematically and on a broader scale. Little by little, through other experiences of comparative studies on particular subjects, we conceived the idea of this project. Briefly, what we have set out to do is to find out whether it is possible to identify systematic connections between political and mass media structures. We were curious, in particular, whether it made sense to think in terms of distinct models of journalism and of the media-politics relationship. This has been an ambition in the field of communication since Four Theories of the Press, and it also seemed to us, as we began to survey the variety of media systems in Western Europe and North America, that there really were clusters of media system characteristics that tended to cooccur in distinct patterns. We introduce a schema centered around three models of journalism and media institutions in the pages that follow – though with plenty of qualifications about the variation that exists within and between actual media systems belonging to these three models.