Because of the coffee queue I came in late to the Thursday morning session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, where Jan Miessler is already in full flight summarising structural functionalism. His overall aim here is to critique the systemic perspective on media systems that was popularised with the seminar work by Hallin and Mancini, which tends to neglect the social actors within the system, and presents a ‘real’ and ‘holistic’ perspective that is actually conjured by the authors.
But a holistic perspective means that nothing can be known, since there is no way to exhaustively describe a system in the first place; therefore the description can only ever be partial, and depends on the aspects that analysts choose to focus on. In turn, this means that the ‘holistic’ description is inherently subjective and biased.
Media systems are therefore static containers defined by arbitrarily chosen variables. The Hallin and Mancini model presents the key media models that are defined by variables including press circulation, political parallelism, journalistic professionalism, and state intervention; why these are more central than others is not coherently grounded in the theory they use. A choice of different variables would produce a very different systems perspective.
The system structure is therefore contradictory; the systems perspective glosses over its inherent flaws, and therefore presents results that are only of limited value.
