North Atlantic or liberal model of media and politics

The North Atlantic or liberal model of media and politics, as defined in Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini's Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, is characterized by an early development of commercial press, information-oriented journalism, strong professionalization, and a market dominated media system.

The newspaper industry within the liberal model is characterized by newspaper circulation and the early development of mass-circulation commercial press. The first instances of newspapers appearing in the west is during the 17th century in Europe with the first instance of what we would call a newspaper appearing in Germany. This paper was called the Strasbourg Relation. Although western civilization was not the first to invent the printing press, it had a very early development of the media format that came from it known a "press". With the expansion of technology, commercial media quickly expanded to encompass many forms. It evolved from standard newspapers and became a part of radio, music, television, movies, and the Internet, as well as many other forms of media.

Jonathan Hardy believes that political parallelism, “refers to the character of links between political actors and the media and more generally the extent to which media reflects political divisions.” In their book, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, Daniel C. Hallin and Paola Mancini use this term to evaluate the link between political parties and media organizations. In the North Atlantic or liberal model, Hallin and Mancini, give a description of political parallelism in the United States, British, Irish, and Canadian media systems. According to Hallin and Mancini the United States contains the most unbiased political parallelism compared to the previous four countries. Hallin and Mancini express how press political partisan is virtually absent in the North Atlantic or liberal model, with the exception of Britain which poses strong press parallelism. Hallin and Mancini insist that in the North Atlantic or liberal model there is a balance within the contents of the media in order to create neutrality within the media system. However, Hetty van Kempen believes it is still likely that press-party parallelism will still vary within the countries of the same model. Kempen reflects on the idea of Seymour-Ure. Ure states, “The same social forces that find expression in a party or parties of a political system tend to find expression also through the press.” Ure’s view illustrates that this is the reason why there is a weak political parallelism in the US and Canada. Hallin and Mancini consider that typically in a multiparty system the press seems to coincide with strong partisanship of the press. According to Sarah El Richani, Hallin and Mancini seem to belittle the media resistance by Europe to commercialization of media. Richani continues to explain that this depiction by Hallin and Mancini also is counter-convergence to the liberal model that portrays the United States in the path of a partisan media on the rise. Richani senses that Hallin and Mancini have reproduced, “a stagist, evolutionist model that privileges the liberal conception of media independence as a higher stage of development” (Hardy 2008, p. 106–107) Who in Richani’s view is questionable.

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