How Far Can Media Systems Travel?

Introduction Only a few books in communication studies have triggered as lively a debate in the academic community as Hallin and Mancini's (2004b) Comparing Media Systems . For decades communication scholars have pushed for more comparative research to advance the theoretical foundations of the field and to generate more systematic knowledge of the differences and similarities of systems of communications across time and space (Blumler, McLeod, and Rosengren, 1992; Esser and Pfetsch, 2004). Even though there have been a number of important collections of country studies (see, for example, Gunther and Mughan, 2000; Kaid and Holtz-Bacha, 1995; Kelly, Mazzoleni, and McQuail, 2004), most of these volumes lack a unifying conceptual framework that would allow us to draw generalizable conclusions beyond the individual cases at hand. Hallin and Mancini's “three models of media and politics” therefore provide a much needed intellectual toolkit for understanding the immense variations between systems of public communication in different cultural and political contexts. Since its publication several scholars have tried to apply the framework to countries other than the group of advanced democracies that are covered in Comparing Media Systems (for Eastern Europe, see Jakubowicz and Sükösd, 2008; for Brazil, Albuquerque, 2005; for South Africa, Hadland, 2007). These studies attempt to classify a particular country into one of the three models – Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist, or Liberal – usually with the conclusion that it is the Polarized Pluralist model that captures best the features of the country under study. With its defining characteristics of journalistic partisanship, political instrumentalization of the media, and uncontrolled commercialization of the media industry, all of which are regarded as problematic and potentially obstructive to a healthy democratic public sphere, the Polarized Pluralist model seems to have become something like a catch-all category for media systems outside the Western world of established democracies. However, it is rather implausible to assume that, whereas eighteen countries in Western Europe and North America are diversified into three distinct constellations of media–politics relationships, all the remaining media systems around the world can be sufficiently understood by only one model. Classifying non-Western media systems as Polarized Pluralist not only implies that these systems are deficient in one way or the other but also that there is no significant variation in institutions and practices except for those that can be observed in the established democracies of the West.