ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the political-media complex advanced in this book to explore a different research agenda. It addresses the question as to how the process of democratisation changed the interaction between the state and the media. But rather than using normative categorisations to conclude that transitional democracies inevitably do not fit, and thus that more media systems categories are needed, these pages look closely at how the complexity of past norms, old practices, new regulatory frameworks, organisational dynamics and a constant dialectic between change and continuity help explain the shortcomings academic research has already uncovered. As a preliminary trial of the political-media, the chapter describes quite dissimilar experiences among transitional democracies. What emerges with a certain sense of clarity is the impracticability of packing all these experiences into one single media model, be it Siebert and his colleagues’ social responsibility model (1956) embedded on an ideal progressive trend from authoritarianism to libertarianism; or be it Hallin and Mancini’s (2004a: 306) polarised pluralist model as, arguably, ‘the most widely applicable’ media system.
