Comparing Media Systems: A New Critical Academic Reading

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Introduction
established in their book Comparing Media System three major blocks: the polarized pluralism model, which included Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France; the corporate democratic model, which included Belgium, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; and the liberal model, to which Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, and the US belonged.Two decades later, technological changes and the evolution of economic and systemic dynamics recommend a new reading of the information structure to test the validity of the models.Thus, the development of the media market or political parallelism, as well as the evolution of journalists' professionalism and state intervention are appropriate issues to continue describing media models, but they are seen as limited variables in a global context.The emergence of the Netflix business model has led to a boom in online platforms, which has displaced traditional media in pursuit of other digital initiatives (Lobato, 2018).At the business level, changes in the sector also show that new developments are taking place in content consumption, establishing an alliance between internet operators, telecommunications, and traditional media companies (Birkinbine et al., 2016).Meanwhile, in the press sector, there is evidence of the weakening of paper newspapers and the search for paid or subscription business models, as well as the incorporation of the online-only press as new political agents (Labio-Bernal & Pineda, 2016).
The present thematic issue takes up the final recommendation of Hallin and Mancini's (2004, pp. 302-303) work that recognized the exploratory nature of their book and encouraged further studies in the face of a foreseeable scenario of homogenization of media systems characterized by secularization, the trend towards the liberal model and commercialization, which raises tensions between the market and democracy.Furthermore, in Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World, the authors themselves recognized, following Humphreys (2009), that "we did not want to encourage the reduction of comparative analysis to a categorization of cases, in which a label becomes a substitute for 'more concrete explanation' " (Hallin & Mancini, 2011, p. 300).We cannot forget, likewise, the recommendation made by Paolo Mancini when he stated that "the idea of media system itself must be readapted and reshaped to the new media ecology" (Mancini, 2020, p. 5761).Thus, the scientific anniversary offers us the opportunity to review and study, from a more current and complex perspective, the proposal made by Hallin and Mancini in 2004.The objective of this monograph, in which they analyze some cases, allows us to continue to legitimize the validity of the models, not as unique categories but as a basis that allows us to delve into the characteristics of different media structures.Mancini's proposal and which offers us an interesting x-ray of the areas, authors, and types of studies that have been developed in this respect.The authors use a software tool, SciMATT, developed by Cobo et al. (2011), to analyze the sample of articles between 2004 and 2022, although they divide them into three periods that they justify scientifically and that make a more comprehensive reading of the results.The importance of public opinion, democratic quality, and political and technological changes gravitate toward the themes that connect with political communication, the importance of the media, and citizen participation when studied under the prism of Hallin and Mancini's model.Interesting findings are found on studies that insist on the adaptation of this theory to current circumstances, dominated by globalization and cross-border technological development.

A European Perspective
The article by Lorena R. Romero-Domínguez ( 2024) is included in this monograph on the challenges that cross-border investigative journalism poses for studying the media models proposed by Hallin and Mancini.
The author performs a quantitative analysis, through an automated content analysis, on the conceptualization of this type of journalism in the successive editions of the European Investigative Journalism Forum, Dataharvest, between 2014 and 2023 through about 1,000 documents containing the summaries of the sessions.The idea that journalism today also develops through cross-border network models where different traditions, narratives, and practices come together serves as a basis to support the renewal of the classical theory that, supported by Hallin (2020) himself, understands as fundamental the impact of transnationalization and the internet.An interesting aspect of the article focuses on demonstrating the existence of other types of journalistic organizations linked to foundations, as well as a transnational parallelism focused on making visible issues such as human rights in the European framework and an objective less linked to business and more to independence.
By countries, the work of Fernández-Viso and Fernández-Alonso (2024) analyzes the communication policies and regulatory bodies in Spain, France, and Portugal to study the changes in the so-called Mediterranean model.The evolution of the sector over the last 20 years leads the authors to propose a review of state intervention in the three countries, focusing especially on the governance of public media, the role of independent regulatory bodies, and funding through state advertising.The methodology, of a qualitative nature, has been carried out through the analysis of legal texts, organizational charts, and reports of regulatory bodies and, finally, a review of public and critical information on media subsidies in the three countries.The study concludes by confirming the prevalence of the polarized pluralism model with a strong presence of government intervention in the Mediterranean media systems studied.

The article by Wandels et al. (2024) offers an interesting point of view by offering a comparison between the
Northern European model of Belgium and the liberal model represented by the US through an evolutionary analysis over time, specifically between 1980 and the present day.From a critical perspective and taking as a fundamental basis the development of neoliberalism and its impact on journalism, the authors carry out an exploratory qualitative analysis of the two case studies mentioned in the context of the last decades.
The intellectual approach of the field theory developed by Bourdieu (2005) is fundamental to understand, according to the authors, how journalistic doxa is marked by the power logics of neoliberal hegemony and the dominant thinking on both sides of the Atlantic.The methodology has been developed through semi-structured interviews with editors, section chiefs, and US and Flemish journalists.In addition, this information has been triangulated with other sources, such as records, company data, autobiographies, and other literature, using NVIVO software to categorize everything.
The article by Lombao et al. (2024) delves into one of the variables of the model: political parallelism in the media (or the degree of influence of parties), in this case, governments, on the public media in the EU.These authors also study other aspects: the intervention and development of regulation, at the national and supranational level; financing and audiences, as well as structural and management changes in these public systems.They also focus on the variation in professional culture and the evolution of the concept of public service of these media in the digital context.All this to discover, finally, those novelties in the national public media two decades after the description made by Hallin and Mancini.The authors study these variables in all EU countries, except for variables for their work the increase of political parallelism, the erosion of journalistic professionalism, and the role of the state connected also with corporations.The thesis of the work maintains that the evolution of the media system in Turkey, especially after 2011, has produced a capture of the sector by the political-corporate power, moving from a model of polarized pluralism to absolute polarization.The work even highlights intimidation tactics, on the part of the state, against those media and information professionals who oppose the government.The result of all this contributes to a professional practice that moves away from ethical sense and social function to work at the service of political-economic interests and disinformation.
This issue closes with an article by Jones and Hadland (2024) which raises an interesting critique of the work of Hallin and Mancini for the case of South Africa, considering its characteristic of a young democracy within the Global South.The article also aims to overcome the idea of a possible "Africanization" of the theses of the three models raised through the subsequent study by Hadland (2012) to provide an update on the relationship between media and politics in the country.To explain these issues, the authors take into account the works of Rodny-Gumede (2015a, 2015b, 2020) and Wasserman (2020) that explain the changes and challenges in the last decade, both internally and in the international context, in the media landscape in South Africa.The authors focus on highlighting problems that occurred in the country, such as the censorship and discrediting processes that occurred against journalists between 2014 and 2017 carried out by the Bell Pottinger company to destabilize the political system.They also criticize the corporate capture and political subordination of different media outlets as a form of "South African state capture," which directly affected social peace and democracy.The authors also delve into the study of the media market and political parallelism, identifying a high degree of government clientelism in both private and public media, which seems to lead the country toward the idea of polarized pluralism.However, the authors conclude by pointing out that, despite the importance of the theses of Hallin andMancini (2004, 2011; see also Hallin et al., 2021), both in their early and later studies, and the work of Hadland (2012), it is more appropriate to apply a hybrid model and create a new typology not centered on the West but on the complex postcolonial context.

Conclusion
It is beyond any discussion that Hallin and Mancini's work is a world reference for media studies with a comparative perspective.In this sense, the review proposed here is more than a critique of the work, but a new academic reading of the exceptional contribution made by these authors in 2004.This thematic issue does not include all the countries analyzed previously, but we do include an interesting sample that allows us to analyze issues such as technological changes, political polarization in a hybrid media system, new audiovisual actors, the transformation of the press business model, and the situation of public media in the digital context.We propose perhaps, as a future line of work, to produce a new monographic issue that expands with more African countries and also includes research from Latin America and Asia.
As a starting point, we consider it important to analyze the quantitative impact on the scientific production of the work.In this sense, the article by de la Mata et al. (2024) with which this monograph begins is an excellent example of the evolution and interpretation of the Hallin and Mancini model by the scientific community, both in terms of its strengths and limitations and potential areas for development.It is a bibliometric work, based on the analysis of almost 3,500 articles published in Web of Science, which have dealt with Hallin and