Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the ...political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.
Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World offers a broad exploration of the conceptual foundations for comparative analysis of media and politics globally. It takes as its point of departure ...the widely used framework of Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems, exploring how the concepts and methods of their analysis do and do not prove useful when applied beyond the original focus of their 'most similar systems' design and the West European and North American cases it encompassed. It is intended both to use a wider range of cases to interrogate and clarify the conceptual framework of Comparing Media Systems and to propose new models, concepts and approaches that will be useful for dealing with non-Western media systems and with processes of political transition. Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World covers, among other cases, Brazil, China, Israel, Lebanon, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Thailand.
In this article we review research published since the publication of Comparing Media Systems which seeks to operationalize concepts discussed in that work and to test the framework proposed there or ...to put forward alternatives or revisions. We focus on works that deal with the original 18 countries covered in Comparing Media Systems, and consider the progress made in developing quantitative measures across these cases for key variables, research testing the grouping of cases in Comparing Media Systems, research extending the comparative analysis of Western media systems to new media, and research on convergence toward the Liberal Model. In the final section, we focus on limitations of the research produced during the 10 years following the publication of Comparing Media Systems, particularly the heavy emphasis on quantitative operationalization, and some of the difficulties in using quantitative analysis to investigate complex, dynamic systems.
The Concept of Hybridity in Journalism Studies Hallin, Daniel C.; Mellado, Claudia; Mancini, Paolo
The international journal of press/politics,
01/2023, Letnik:
28, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper considers the use of the concept of hybridity in journalism studies, arguing that the concept of hybridity has served an important role in reorienting the field in the face of important ...processes of social change, but that as a “sensitizing concept” in the sense that Herbert Blumer used the term, it requires critical reflection and more careful specification of its various uses. In the first sections, we map three principal contexts in which the concept has been invoked: one focusing on new media and the blurring of professional boundaries it produces; one focusing on global flows of journalism culture, and a third which treats hybridity not as a novel but as quotidian and rooted in the structural context of the practice of journalism in general. The second part of the paper focuses on issues and challenges in the use of the concept of hybridity. We consider the tendency for hybridity to become a catch-all phrase that substitutes for more specific analysis, and the problem of treating novel phenomena as derivative forms of familiar ones. We then move to critique “presentism” in the discussion of hybridity and the distortions that result from drawing dichotomies between hybrid and “pure” forms, making the argument for taking seriously the idea that hybridity is universal. In the final section, we propose the idea of the hybridity cycle as a way of thinking about stability and change in journalism studies.
Print journalism has long been seen as a key institution of democratic politics, serving to enhance transparency, provide a forum for debate, and facilitate public participation. Instead, television ...journalism, particularly in its commercial form, has often been seen more negatively, as a form of infotainment that contributes little to the functions of journalism as an institution of democratic citizenship. Some scholars have questioned the dichotomy between infotainment and democratic roles, however, and the existing research comparing journalistic roles in print and television has produced mixed results. Focusing on the case of Chile and making use of a standardized news content-based index of journalistic roles, this study compares the prevalence of three professional roles by medium—newspapers and television—and also by audience orientation—popular and elite media across both print and television news. Our results show that commercial television in Chile is higher than print media in the performance of the watchdog and civic roles, and the infotainment role is positively, not negatively, correlated with these. We discuss the implication of these findings in light of the literature on infotainment and citizenship, as well as the emerging body of research on journalistic role performance.
This article examines the historical conditions for the electoral victory of Donald Trump and contemporary populist movements more generally, focusing on neoliberalism and populism. Populism is ...understood here according to the discourseanalytic perspective of Ernesto Laclau. After discussing the way in which neoliberalism undermined the legitimacy of political systems based on the "politics of difference," the article goes on to elaborate an argument that although populist movements like the Trump movement can be said to be a product of the mediatisation of politics, they reflect a very different form of mediatisation from the form analyzed in the classic literature in political communication. That literature focuses on the history of Europe, especially, in the 1960s-1980s, when centralized media like commercial newspapers and television became more autonomous and displaced the influence of political parties and similar mass organizations. Contemporary populist movements develop within a fragmented media ecology in which it is possible for populist leaders to bypass these legacy media institutions and challenge their legitimacy.
This study examines health news in Norwegian, Spanish, British, and U.S. newspapers. It seeks to fill a gap in journalism studies in the examination of health news as a genre, particularly in a ...comparative context, and with a focus on broader social and political roles and meanings of health news, rather than effects on individual behavior. It is rooted in literatures that seek to understand health journalism in sociological terms, considering the role of health journalism in relation to institutional relationships between biomedicine, the market, and the state. It departs, in particular, from the theory of biomedicalization, which holds that the field of biomedicine, increasingly transformed into a complex, commercialized “techno-service complex,” has deep cultural impact, including the spreading of a conception of an individualized patient-consumer who will actively seek information to control risk and pursue wellness. In this article, we ask whether research on health news centered around this model, mostly carried out in the United States, is generalizable to European countries where the health system is organized primarily according to a public service model. The study considers three aspects of health news content: the implied audience of news stories, distinguishing in particular between those that address readers as patient-consumers and those that address them as citizens; the distinction among biomedical, lifestyle, and social frames for understanding health issues; and the range of actors reflected in health news as sources and as story originators.
Health and medicine are major topics of news coverage, but research on health and medical reporting has remained mainly confined to specialist subfields, with less impact on broader academic fields, ...including journalism studies, than would seem warranted by its importance. This article argues that assumptions implicit in much of this literature have limited the development of a wider tradition of research on health journalism. We point particularly to what we call the linear-reflectionist perspective, which sees health journalism as an often-flawed mechanism for transmitting pre-existing medical knowledge to the mass public. We propose an alternative framework that seeks to illuminate the complexity and importance of this field of study.
