Comparative Models of Journalism

The study of comparative models of journalism endeavors to describe, compare, classify, analyze, and explain news systems in diverse countries, cultures, and political systems, and across time periods. This area of research has evolved from largely descriptive and value-laden efforts of U.S. scholars during the 1950s to differentiate media by systems of political control into an important and increasingly sophisticated subfield of international and comparative communication characterized by an array of different approaches.

In the past, models of journalism have tended to be “normative” or prescriptive in nature, hinging on implicit if not explicit moral judgments about what structures, practices, and outcomes are “best” for a society. Comparative models of journalism also are typically descriptive rather than analytical, concerned with similarities and differences in the features of media systems than with explanations of what accounts for such similarity and difference.

Such comparisons across cultures also have tended to rest on the assumption that Western, and particularly Anglo-American, ways of organizing and doing journalism constituted the desirable norm. Part of this is due simply to the fact that many of the relevant researchers come from North America and Britain. From this perspective, government constraints are seen as the greatest danger to freedom of expression, while private ownership of media is the most important bulwark against government interference.

Although this view has fallen out of favor among academics, partly due to a broader movement to “de-Westernize” media studies, it still prevails in policy studies and advocacy carried out by international media watchdog organizations such as the New York–based Freedom House and the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, which issue annual rankings of the world's press freedom on a country-by-country basis.