Beyond the four theories of the press: A new model of national media systems

Beyond the four theories of the press: A new model of national media systems

Work on categorization of national press systems in the last 40 years has been grounded in the well-known Four Theories of the Press. Whereas this approach has been strongly criticized by international scholars for its idealism and its poverty of empiricism, it is still widely taught in introductory journalism courses across the country, and few theorists have engaged in grounding the theory with data in international settings. Although journalism is contextualized and constrained by press structure and state policies, it is also a relatively autonomous cultural production of journalists negotiating between their professionalism and state control.
This article thus proposes a new model incorporating the autonomy of individual journalistic practices into political and social structural factors—the interaction of which might currently more accurately represent press practices in the new international order. With an understanding of the background of the journalistic practices and state policies of 4 countries/cities, the multinational media coverage of a specific event is explicated in the light of the new model. This new model
explains the journalistic variations that cannot be clearly revealed using a state-policy press model alone.

Published online: 17 Nov 2009, but actually first published in print in 2002.