Marína Urbániková

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.