Press Theories

The idea of “press theories” dates from Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm's 1956 book Four Theories of the Press, which advanced the thesis [Page 648]that media systems could be classified in terms of four philosophical orientations: the Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and Soviet Communist press theories. Two of these, the Social Responsibility and Soviet Communist theories, are considered to be variations on the other, more basic ones; this framework thus divided media systems into two fundamental categories, understood in terms of the role of the media in relation to the state and the individual: in the Authoritarian model, the media served the state; in the Libertarian model, it served the individual.

Four Theories of the Press has widely been used to classify media systems worldwide, and subsequent authors have often started from its framework and added additional “press theories.” Some authors, for example, add “development journalism” as a fifth theory. The notion of development journalism was advocated by many journalists and intellectuals in developing countries during the 1970s as an alternative to dominant Western theories. Development journalism was built around the idea that the primary function of the press was to promote modernization and nation building through education and mobilization of communities; it deemphasized the notions of the press both as a “watchdog” of state power and as a servant of advertisers and consumers. Some have also noted that Northern European social democratic theory deviates from Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm's four categories, since it emphasizes press freedom but includes a strong positive role for the state.

Both of these “fifth” press theories stand apart from Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm's formulation because they rest on conceptions of the media's role that are not built around the opposition between state and individual: the social democratic theory puts greater stress on the tension between the market and the public sphere, and the development communication perspective on the divisions between the global North and South and between dependence and modernization. In the 1960s, American modernization theories also classified media systems into traditional, transitional, and modern based not on the distinction between libertarianism and authoritarianism, but on the degree to which specialized communication institutions had emerged, intensifying social exchange and displacing traditional means of communication tied to structures of kinship and status. Individualism was important in this framework but was not necessarily opposed to the state, which was often seen as a force for modernization.

Four Theories of the Press was attractive to media scholars because it raised the question of the relation between media institutions and the wider societies of which they were a part. The press theories proposed by Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm, and others following in their footsteps, however, were normative theories of the press; that is, they were theories about how the press should be organized. They were not really empirical models; that is, scholarly theories about how different media systems actually worked They could perhaps most accurately be described as press ideologies, since they were advanced to fight political battles over the role of the press—Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm reinterpreted liberal press theory to help fight the Cold War battles of ideas between the Soviet bloc and the West, for instance, while the advocates of development journalism or more recently of “Asian journalism” developed their ideas to fight the influence of those same liberal theories.

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