ABSTRACT
Typologies designed to account for the diversity of media systems around the world have been a recurring element of communication research for well over half a century. Yet, in common with comparative endeavours in other areas of social scientific inquiry, the analysis of media systems has long been plagued by simplistic, teleological and ethnocentric understandings of social change. The four-fold typology of press models proposed by Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm in 1956 – which distinguished between the authoritarian, libertarian, social responsibility, and Soviet communist concepts of the press – was designed from the normative perspective of classical liberalism, and ranked the four types of the press on an evolutionary scale culminating in the press model promoted in the West. The analytical framework used was too narrow to capture the varied social and political theories underpinning media policies around the world, and left little scope for acknowledging the unequal distribution of economic, political and communicative power on a global scale (Christians et al. 2009: viii). In this sense, the title of the book – Four Theories of the Press – was a misnomer: instead of offering four theories of the press, it offered ‘one theory with four examples’ (Nerone 1995: 18).
