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.

No abstract

This paper discusses the possible consequences of mass media fragmentation over the structure and the functioning of democracy. Media fragmentation and audience segmentation are not new but they greatly increased in the very last years because of the long ongoing tendency towards commercialization and mostly because of the development of new media and the internet in particular. This has determined what is usually defined “the crisis of traditional journalism” that has become the very frequent topic of most of the seminar on journalism today. The last part of the paper looks at the possible consequences of these changes over the structure of democracy beyond the well rooted techno-optimism: increasing social and political polarization, new forms of political socialization, more complex process of social and political negotiation, new forms of public scrutiny.

No abstract

No abstract