Media coverage of the prevention of health problems in selected Czech newspaper and their online forms for the year 2010.

The authoress of the diploma thesis aims to determine if it is possible for the public to learn serious information by means of media, i.e. information related to the prevention of health problems, and to monitor the state of medialisation of these problems by setting partial targets. The objective of the diploma thesis is to discover if media address such topics which should be medialised, in the view of statistically most frequent causes of death and the perspective of prevention and protection of the public health. The nature of significant health problems and the prevention of what topics should appear in daily newspapers have been determined in accordance with epidemiologic data and frequency of diseases which have been the most common causes of death in the Czech Republic in the long term, and which are summarized, inter alia, in mortality tables of the Czech Statistical Office. Another partial objective is to establish what types of themes appear most frequently, to determine the differences between the online and printed forms of media, and to discover who the authors engaging in these problems are. Two dailies were selected for our research - MfDnes (with its regional supplement Jižní Čechy) and the regional Českobudějovický deník in the printed form, including their supplements, including some of their thematic web pages. The research has also examined three independent magazines.The present diploma thesis is divided into a theoretical part and a research part. The theoretical part summarizes - based on the study of available literature and secondary data analysis - basic information regarding the problems of health and illness, prevention, media, the most common causes of death in the Czech Republic, briefly characterizing individual diseases and risk factors of their origin, as being familiar with such facts is essential for their prevention.The research part approaches the collection and evaluation of data in a combined manner. First, data were collected and studied by analysing documents. Afterwards, data were evaluated by means of qualitative statistics, whereas the methods of so-called descriptive statistics were utilized. The quantitative content analysis - which is usually used for the research into mass media - was used for analysing articles. The acquired data were tested statistically by bivariate analysis method. Copies of dailies and their magazines from 2010 were found in the Research Library of South Bohemia. News servers and thematic web pages were browsed by means of media archive.Individual objectives of the diploma thesis have been met. The reached conclusion stipulates that on the one hand, media do address the prevention of significant health problems; on the other hand, they fail to interconnect it with concrete diseases to an adequate extent. The medialisation of topics related to neoplasms is insufficient. Moreover, the thesis has discovered that the most common themes that media engage in are related to the problems of nutrition/overweight and slimming, both in the online and printed forms of all media analysed. It has been determined that the representation of article topics differ for individual media analysed. The most frequent authors of such articles are women. In most cases, there are most often two or three authors who participate in the medialisation of prevention of health problems. In the authoress?s view, the present diploma thesis may provide feedback to authors who examine issues of the prevention of health problems. In addition, with its illustrative overview of the most common causes of death in the Czech Republic, the thesis might highlight the necessity of medialisation of prevention of some themes; and, contrariwise, it could pinpoint less important, but frequently medialised themes, which take up too much space in both printed and online media