Česká média a zahraniční politika: v hradním stínu a zajetí emocí
Czech Media and Foreign Policy: Emotions and Domestic Narratives

Summary/Abstract: On the basis of the analysis of news content from 2008 to 2012, we describe in this article the tendencies of Czech media in dealing with foreign policy topics, using a combination of quantitative content analysis and qualitative case studies of selected foreign policy events. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate that the coverage of political events in the media is highly personalised and viewed through the prism of the personal or political interests of Czech political elites and the conflicts between them. As concerns the diversity of the actors presented and topics covered, the Czech media produce a considerably restricted and more or less uniform stream of news commented upon by a relatively limited spectrum of actors, mainly Czech politicians. For non- -political, non-governmental, and international actors, access to the debate is considerably limited. The print media tends to present major political events as power-based conflicts between individuals or groups, rather than as negotiations about public affairs supported by substantive arguments. In effect, Habermas’s classical vision of the role of mass media in democracy, which is to promote rational discussion as a desirable form of public debate, is replaced with persuasion through emotional appeal, which has been widely criticised. At the same time, however, some theoretical traditions see it more positively as a less restrictive form of public discourse.

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