Jaromír Volek

Sourcing the News: Comparing Source Use and Media Framing of the 2009 European Parliamentary Elections

The relationship between journalists and their sources has been described as an interdependent relationship where each part needs the other. For political actors, this relationship is particularly important during election campaigns, when their need to reach voters through the media is even more urgent than usual. This is particularly true with respect to European Parliamentary election campaigns, as these are often less salient and as peoples need for orientation is greater than in national elections. However, there is only limited cross-national research on the medias use of news sources and whether there are associations between the use of news sources and media framing. This holds true for research on election campaigns in general and on European Parliamentary election campaigns in particular. Against this background, this study investigates cross-national differences and similarities in the medias use of news sources in their coverage of the 2009 European Parliamentary election campaigns and the extent to which the use of news sources is associated with the medias framing of politics and the EU. The study draws upon a quantitative content analysis of the media coverage in twelve countries. Findings suggest that there are both important similarities and differences across countries with respect to the use of news sources and that there are cases when the use of news sources is related to the framing of politics and the EU.

The professional identity of Czech journalists in an international perspective

This article, placed in the field of comparative journalism studies, explores the extent to which Czech journalists share their professional identity and compares the congruence of their professional identity with selected Western journalistic communities working in the liberal, democratic-corporatist, and polarized pluralism media model defined by Hallin and Mancini. The results show that the professional identity structure of Czech journalists does not, in principle, differ from that of foreign journalists. This implies that they have cut themselves from the Soviet journalistic model. Czech journalists do not significantly differ in the intensity of the selected professional values, and the measure of their professional identity split is comparable to that of their foreign counterparts.

Between Europeanization and De-Europeanization: A Comparative Content Analysis of the Pre-election Presentation of the EU Agenda in the Czech Quality Press

Abstract The paper explores the process of the Czech journalists setting the EU agenda in the media during the ‘hot phase’ of the Czech national parliament election campaigns in 2002, 2006, and 2010. Unlike most studies that concentrated on the media agenda in the European Parliament election campaigns, we focused on periods that were neither strictly key events nor routine, but that were more intensively covered by the media and simultaneously generated more influential political representation defining national political attitudes towards the EU. Articles that referred to the EU during the ‘hot phase’ were content analyzed. The results suggest that in the Czech press, the EU agenda is less and less visible, and, moreover, that it is increasingly negatively framed and reduced to an economic agenda.