Konkurrierende journalistische Kulturen: Gehört das Mediensystem Lettlands zum Klientel-Modell?

After a short depiction of Latvia’s media system’s development since the historical change at the beginning of the 1990s, the article examines whether the present Latvian media system is still a clientelistic one following the approach of pragmatic differentiating (Roger Blum 2014). Latvia was one of the 23 countries chosen for his study, and four of them were assessed as belonging to the clientelistic model.
It comes out that in Latvia concurrently three different competing journalistic cultures coexist, namely, the modern, the instrumental, and the traditional one. The author concludes that Latvia was rightly identified as a very typically clientelistic media system and distinctly separates the Latvian development from the public service model as in Germany and from the shock model of Russian media system.
Estonia, neighbouring in the north from Latvia, is grouped with public service systems, while southern neighbour Lithuania is also identified as a clientelistic media system along with the rest of the CEE countries. This approach is more applicable both for comparative research as well for the assessment of the development than the three models of Western media and politics (Hallin, Mancini 2004), which groups all three Baltic States with North/Central European or Democratic Corporatist Model, at least historically.