Media dialogical networks and political argumentation

Advances in Language and Literary Studies

In any society there is a link between social-intellectual (ideological) views and discursive structures in media. Therefore, it is possible to discover this relationship by clarifying appropriate discursive remedies in text analysis and eventually determining how it is and its application. Some journalists are very skillful in literature, their discussion talent and their ability to manipulate the language result in complexity in language form and also in semantic features. Many fundamental factors are involved in production and comprehension of the press texts. The main objective of the current study is to investigate some of these factors such as powers relations in the society and also political and ideological institutions in press texts. Applying a discourse analysis approach and considering news theories, this study tries to analyze French press texts and explore the ways information is transferred to the addressees through word selection. The findings of this study indicate ...

The Czech Centre-Right Solutions to the Political Challenges of 2017, 2017

The issue we are facing at present is not a lack of information but a lack of reliable information. We are witnessing the growing transformation of Czech society into a post-truth society with a vast plurality of information and opinions but with a certain resignation on actual truth. The media are the primary tool of political communication and have undergone a major change wherein a number of them have been taken over by powerful businessmen. Additional factors affecting the media include the rise of social media and the introduction of new communication strategies and tools, including so-called " infoganda ". The primary current threat seems to come from the pro-Russian influence which is aimed at undermining democratic institutions in the country. Czech right-wing parties have repeatedly warned against the Russian influence and have available several tools to resist it including support for higher media literacy and fact-checking projects and the implementation of a better communication policy.

The Power of Speech. A Critical Reading of Media and Political Texts, 2020

The present monograph documents and analyses the contemporary trends in public communication over the last decades which the general public, i.e., speakers outside the field of linguistics and cultural studies, has interpreted intuitively as “worsening” and “lowering of standards”. It focuses on expressivity in public discourse in Czech and Polish, monitored for the period between the end of the World War II and the present. The use of expressivity and vulgarisms in public communication has been studied in an extensive corpus of both written and spoken texts and analysed from quantitative as well as qualitative perspective. The researchers’ main intention was to characterize the linguistic means of expressivity and to learn which linguistic planes are employed most frequently for these communicative purposes. The essential part of the monograph discusses the texts produced after 1989 during the restoration of democracy in Central Europe that record political discourse in the media. Besides, these studies examine the cases when media give floor to non-professional speakers who do not have any contract to the particular medium. The research in political discourse points out to quite a strong tendency of the speakers in political debates to avoid relevant arguments (ad rem ideas) and replace them with false statements threatening or damaging the hearer’s face (ad hominem fallacies). Another typical feature of the political discourse (and public discourse in general) after 1989 is personalizing. Politicians utilise social network sites to create the illusion of intimacy by addressing every elector seemingly “in person”. Their communicative pseudo-strategies include discussing the topics which are normally excluded from TV channels discourses (ostracization of ethnic, religious or sexual minorities, etc.) and typically associated with stylistically marked expressions. The use of expressivity and vulgarisms in present-day public discourse is confronted with the recent history: in particular with Communist newspeak and 1960s/70s media discourse reflecting on some high-profile social and political issues, e.g., men’s long haircuts or the role of religion and church in the society. The analyses of the newspaper texts, echoing the official ideology, indicate that the regime was reluctant to admit the lack of control over such social phenomena and, consequently, label them as an “import” from behind the Iron Curtain. Two studies on expressivity and verbal aggressiveness in present-day Polish public communication set the topic into the international frame. They primarily test the assumption that the intellectual horizons of interlocutors are limited by the medium, i.e., the online environment. The research focuses on two events: first, the burning of books by J. K. Rowling and S. Meyer and of other pop-culture items organized by Polish priests that was widely discussed on Facebook; second, the anti-government protest in Prague described in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza in June 2019 that was commented by over 500 readers on the magazine website. The identification of specific communicative strategies confirmed that the mode of communication (the internet) influences the quality of discourse.

Media Transformations, 2012

One of the leading arguments of this paper is that contemporary Central and East European societies are a perfect example of hybrid social systems. Even more, CEE nations could be looked at as if they are 'social laboratories' where all controversies, trends and consequences of modern life are tested. The discussion here concentrates on CEE media transformations, and it mainly moves around the idea that media functions and journalistic routines are indirectly shaped by contextual features. Likewise, media culture is formed on the basis of contextual (political, economic) particularities and is furthermore shaped by the traditions, social relations, behaviors and norms, which characterize society in general, and not only a part of professional culture. Since journalism indirectly confirms a society's culture, it could be said that studying media in any country could become a fascinating and inspiring exercise. For this purpose, this paper offers a conceptual model which could be further used in disclosing the cultural particularities of CEE journalism and media culture.

Revista Romana De Sociologie, 2013

This study aims at emphasizing the institutional transformations that occurred in the public environment following the events in December 1989 in Romania, focusing on the dismantling of mechanisms that marked the transition from the national-communist propaganda discourse to the informative discourse, which laid the foundation of the public sphere in post-totalitarian Romania. The hypothesis is that Romanian media was slow in abandoning the communist press model, which explains the manichaeist discourse of nowadays media, the involvement of politics in media business and, last but not least, the extremely poor market-the poorest in Eastern Europe, as showed by the latest studies. The analysis has two components: the context analysis (historical, political, and ideological) and the media discourse analysis, in line with the view of certain authors (C. Sparks) with respect to the transitions in Eastern Europe and the role the media played in these processes. The discourse procedures of the totalitarian language were emphasized by investigating a corpus formed of the main publications of the printed press before and after 1989.

Czech sociological review

Six days after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 6th January 1993, an article appeared in the Czech national daily Rudé právo. It reported two events – a meeting of the preparatory committee of the Democratic Party of Sudetenland (Cz. Demokratická strana Sudety) and a subsequent news conference given by its chair-man, Jaroslav Blühmel. The party and its chairman were previously almost unknown to the public. The two events, however, turned out to be politically significant. What Blühmel had said was reported in most of the Czech mass media, and elicited public reactions from major Czech politicians. The materials we use in this paper include most of the articles in Czech national newspapers during the period which dealt with J. Blühmel and the Democratic Party of Sudetenland (DPS), together with a relevant TV programme. We focus on how the political identity of the DPS was established and contested in the Czech mass media. The category 'DPS' was to begin with almost inter-...

Armenian folia anglistika, 2022

There are different research methods, techniques and strategies that are used to study the text. One of such methods is the method of textual analysis, a variety of study approaches used to analyze and comprehend a piece of writing. Understanding media-political texts and avoiding manipulation and information bias requires not only linguistic and extra-linguistic competence, but also awareness of different strategies. In the present paper, we are aimed to provide an overview of textual analysis as a research tool for studying incidents of manipulation in media news broadcasts from a textological perspective.

Perspectives on Politics, 2012