“In the simplest terms,” Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm wrote in Four Theories of the Press (1956), “the question behind this book is, why is the press as it is? Why does it apparently serve different purposes and appear in widely different forms in different countries? Why, for example, is the press of the Soviet Union so different from our own, and the press of Argentina, so different from that of Great Britain?”

Nearly half a century later the field of communication has made limited progress in addressing this kind of question. Though there have been attempts, particularly since the 1970s, to push the field in the direction of comparative analysis, such a research tradition remains essentially in its infancy. We attempt in this book to propose some tentative answers to the questions posed by Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm – though not on such a grand scale. We confine ourselves to the developed capitalist democracies of Western Europe and North America. We attempt to identify the major variations that have developed in Western democracies in the structure and political role of the news media, and to explore some ideas about how to account for these variations and think about their consequences for democratic politics. We place our primary focus on the relation between media systems and political systems, and therefore emphasize the analysis of journalism and the news media, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, media policy and law.