Much has already been said and written about the lack of new or developing democratic countries in the sample used to populate Hallin and Mancini's three-model paradigm (2004b). This has indeed been the subject of considerable criticism (Couldry, 2005; Hampton, 2005; Nisbet and Moehler, 2005). Yet the objective of extending Hallin and Mancini's framework to the dozens of democracies that sprung up during the Third Wave of the 1990s is a daunting and ambitious task. Most of the world's democracies are relatively new and are systemically diverse (Diamond, 1996). Even within sub-Saharan Africa, a number of typologies have been proposed over the past three decades aiming to capture the features of political regimes, many of which are undergoing processes of substantial social and political change (Nisbet and Moehler, 2005).

The often fraught process of democratic consolidation has thrown the contested interests and roles of the state and the media into stark relief. It is my contention that the experiences of new democracies offer a critique of the three-model paradigm that is highly relevant and that demands expansion and revision of the original framework. Certainly, Hallin and Mancini noticed the bias toward mature democracies, acknowledging it in their text and indeed calling in it, as well as in subsequent interactions with the scholarly world, for a broader consideration and application of their theory and for the inevitable proposal of alternate or additional variables and models. This indeed is the very purpose of the current collection of essays and is eloquent proof of the authors’ stated intention.