Crooked Timber and the Broken Branch: The Invisible Hand in the Marketplace of Ideas by Peter Beattie

Author:Peter Beattie [Beattie, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Philosophy, Free Speech, Civil Liberties, Political Activism, Politics, Social Sciences, Non-Fiction, Propaganda, Ideology
ISBN: 9781546821694
Google: auavswEACAAJ
Amazon: 1546821694
Goodreads: 33275301
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2017-05-18T23:00:00+00:00

v. Testing the three models of media systems

Lisa Müller has made an impressive attempt to quantify key components of the three media models and measure 47 countries’ performance according to these components.1668 First, she splits indicators between those measuring features of structure, and those measuring content. The structural features include “access to information” (newspaper circulation, radio and TV sets per capita, and the number of computers and internet users as a percentage of the population), “quantitative diversity” (the number of newspaper titles, newspaper imports as a percentage of GDP, number of TV stations, and percentage of households receiving foreign or international channels), and “qualitative diversity” (the ideological balance of politically-aligned newspapers, the share of politically-neutral newspapers’ circulation, and the strength of the public broadcaster).1669 The content features include “amount of critical political information” (share of newspaper articles on politics, and share of articles on the government and parliament mentioning malpractice), “balance of political information” (balance of coverage of the various constitutional branches and public administration), and “platform for diverse interests” (equality in mentions of political parties, vote-proportional frequency in mentions of political parties, share of articles mentioning more than one party, and average number of parties mentioned per article).1670 These are concepts only partially encompassed by the measurements used to grasp them, but they provide a good first approximation.

Concerning structural features, Western and Central European media systems like those of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland perform best for all three dimensions overall. The Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon countries, as well as Japan, perform particularly well on the “access to information” dimension, while small European countries like Cyprus, Luxembourg, and Switzerland perform well in “quantitative diversity.” For “qualitative diversity,” a broader array of countries performs well, including France, Finland, India, and Israel.1671 In terms of content, Müller faced significant data limitations, cutting her analysis to newspapers in ten countries. Within this limited sample and reduced scope, Liberal media systems do best in terms of “amount of critical political information,” while Democratic Corporatist countries do fairly well on the “balance of political information” dimension while truly shining in terms of providing a “platform for diverse interests.”1672 Overall, Müller’s empirical analysis provided some support for Hallin and Mancini’s typologies on the structural level, but differed significantly on the content level.1673

More interesting than how well theory fits empirical data, however, are the real-world effects of the various structural and content-based features of different media systems. Access to information1674 is correlated strongly with political participation, and to a lesser degree, so is quantitative diversity.1675 Equality of political participation was not significantly affected by any of the three structural measures, after accounting for interest in politics. (Though interest in politics may well be a partial product of qualitative and quantitative diversity in the abstract, beyond their data-limited measurements.) How well the political views of representatives match those of the citizenry, and the inclusion of minority groups in government, are both positively correlated with all three structural media system measurements: access to information, quantitative diversity, and qualitative diversity.1676 (Qualitative

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