Abstract
It’s high time for the study of journalism everywhere to be less U.S.-centric and, in the United States, for it to be less mechanistic and more philosophical. These three books provide a Eurocentric view and a philosophical analysis that would enrich our understanding of our own journalism in whatever country we happen to be.
In the journalism school of my own education, I was taught only “American” journalism, with the implication that it was the only authentic form of journalism. I was fortunate to be able to travel abroad—both before and after school—and saw that journalism was practiced differently in each country. I realized it was more of a cultural construct than a fixed idea.
Later, when two colleagues and I authored a comprehensive text on mass communication—in the early 1970s—we wrote from a U.S. perspective, but we included a chapter on comparative media and formulated a “media systems paradigm” that attempted to account for differences in media and journalism from one country to the next. Each country’s system was conditioned by that country’s laws, technological proficiencies and availabilities, economic conditions, available resources, level of literacy, and so on. No two countries in the world are exactly alike in all these particulars, so we reasoned that each will be compelled to have its own system of journalism.
Although these three books are European, they don’t take only a “Continental” view; rather, they often discuss the differences between and among nations. Even with a common European economy now, these countries still have different languages, customs, local laws, and traditions, and all these and more are reflected in their differences in journalism and media practices.
All three of these books are premised on the notion that journalism exists in a “public sphere” owned by all in a society. The concept of the public sphere was popularized among European thinkers by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), and other works. American journalism rarely is based on the public sphere, but rather more often on the “private sphere” of property and First Amendment rights.
The one commonality between the U.S. media and all the media discussed here is that the free flow of information is regarded as essential to democracy. Countries that are fascist or communist or authoritarian for economic or religious reasons could be expected to have a completely different rationale and purpose for their media. Europeans have traditionally viewed journalism as a political act; its economic consequences have been secondary. Americans have made journalism primarily a privately owned business, so economics has always been the driver. Increasingly this has meant reaching the largest audience for the advertiser, encouraging a journalism that’s often more entertaining than informative.
We start with Géraldine Muhlmann, a professor of political science and political philosophy at the University of Paris, because her book, “a theoretical essay on the practice of journalism,” is the most philosophical and thus perhaps most European of the three. Her point of view is that of the elite, educated, and sophisticated French academic. Muhlmann is concerned with the low regard in which journalists are held in France by this group. She doesn’t say it, but she implies that journalism in France is becoming more American—that is, not only increasingly aimed at the lowest common denominator but also increasingly objective.
She uses a Baudelairean concept of flanerie—which Muhlmann defines as the disinterested gaze—to describe objective journalism. “Much of what is found exasperating in [flanerie] journalism, the flitting from one subject to another, the constantly shifting gaze,” is not real journalism, and it is not the subject of her critique here. She regards flanerie itself as a bias. Her “ideal critique” considers journalism as a project for “conflictual unifying” of the political community—in other words, well-reasoned political theses.
She concludes that while “there is good reason for the anger journalism arouses in France,” she understands journalism’s importance in democracy, and maintains that there are both “good reasons for vigilance, and also for rejection of trivial criticism that is ignorant of [journalism’s] problems.” Her journey to reach this conclusion is based not on an examination of French newspaper coverage or journalism itself, but rather on her analysis of philosophical concepts, from the liberal English philosophers of the seventeenth century to Kant and Marx, from sociologists R. E. Park and H. M. Hughes to Jean Paul Sartre. This philosophical approach has typified much European journalistic analysis in the past.
The other two books are edited collections and more contemporary in their methods. Media, Markets & Public Spheres provides an overview of “the major general trends and some of the national differences in European media developments over the last 40–50 years” by researchers from ten different countries. Editors Jostein Gripsrud, a professor at the University of Bergen, Norway, and Lennart Weibull, of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, write that these essays provide a “highly useful concretization in relation to the theory of the public sphere, the most central approach to the question of media and democracy.”
The essays analyze European media in three different dimensions: “the structural, the representational, and the interactional.” The editors conclude that the research represented here validates the media criticism formulated by Habermas. The book’s subtitle, European Media at the Crossroads, suggests that change is a common denominator, especially ongoing media tabloidization and commercialization, regulation and deregulation, shifts from elite to mass, and the rise of a celebrity culture in the public sphere, developments in media history, and changes in media policy. Four essays concern specific areas: Nordic countries, Britain, France, and Poland. Other essays discuss different aspects of media in the various countries.
As in the Muhlmann book, the analysis here is often through the lens of political philosophers such as Habermas or sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu. But there is also a fair representation of American communication scholars. The book concludes with some useful tables, including “basic characteristics by selected leading national newspapers” in twelve key countries.
Toril Aalberg and James Curran’s How Media Inform Democracy is subtitled A Comparative Approach, and they write in the first essay that “a comparative perspective can make national assumptions seem less settled.” That was certainly one of the results for students in my seminar on comparative media systems. Many of my students, especially the Americans, soon realized they had no idea that media were not all the same everywhere. It was an important realization.
These editors write that “we know surprisingly little about how the democratic performance of the media compares between countries, even at the basic level.” They hope their book will make a start in filling this void. Aalberg is a professor of sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Curran is a professor of communication at the University of London. In their own research, they compare structural parameters of population, politics, and media across Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and the comparison is not complimentary to the Americans. Among other findings, they show that TV viewing is the highest in the United States and newspaper circulation is second lowest. Support for public television is the lowest in the United States, where advertising expenditures are the highest. The percentage of viewers of evening TV news, relative to the size of the population, is the lowest in the United States, by far, of all six nations.
More crucial, they conclude that how a nation organizes its television system influences its supply and consumption of news. They found across their six-country comparison that commercial TV channels offer less prime-time news compared to national public television channels, and that commercial news attracts fewer viewers. Some of their other findings include the following:
Americans are less informed about international and domestic hard news than all European countries in the survey.
They have a greater disposition to watch soft news.
American TV inspires the most distrust. Of Americans, 41% say that they have no trust at all in TV news, compared to 6% of Dutch people and 9% of Belgians. No other country in the sample came anywhere near the level of TV distrust that exists in America.
The emergence of partisanship in American TV news has followed deregulation and the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine. The other five countries in the survey still have some form of fairness requirement.
While the uninterested citizens in Europe still managed to be well informed, this is not the case in the United States, where they could answer only 25% of the domestic hard news questions they were asked. In Europe the figures for similar groups were 49% in the United Kingdom and 70% in the Netherlands.
In Europe, the citizen watching a popular channel needs to actively avoid information about public affairs. In the United States, the citizen watching a popular channel needs to actively seek out information.
“[T]he problem for American democracy,” Aalberg and Curran write, “is that it is being rejected by a sizeable proportion of its citizens who are opting out of the news market.” They conclude that the problem has to do with the organization of the media. The difference in broadcast systems is “one key significant factor” in this development.
As these three books clearly illustrate, there is much to be learned about our own system by looking at other systems.