The Relationship Between Media Ownership and News Content: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Year In Review Articles on 2019 and 2020 in Czech Media

This master's thesis explores the relationship between news content and owners of print and online media publishers in the Czech Republic. In the recent decade, the Czech media scene has been subject to a phenomenon called oligarchisation, a process when vast most majority of international owners were gradually replaced by local media moguls who also do business in other sectors than the media. The theoretical part of the thesis looks at the media oligarchisation in the Central and Eastern Europe and associated threats to the standards of journalism and democracy per se. The empirical part offers a quantitative content analysis of year in review articles on 2019 and 2020. These articles were published in print and online newspapers in the five main media houses. The coding unit for analysis is an evaluative mention, i.e. only one part of each article, dedicated to a single event, name or trend. The resulting data is tested by a simple analysis of relative frequency, and is also subjected to Pearson's chi-square test. This latter examines the relationships of categorical variables. Subsequently, a correspondence analysis focuses on the most significant associations between media houses and variables of the analysed articles. The results of the analyses indicated that three of the five examined..