Polarization of the Czech Media Landscape after 2013: Discourse Analysis of New Media ProjectsPolarization of the Czech Media Landscape after 2013: Discourse Analysis of New Media Projects

The thesis deals with the polarization of Czech media landscape after 2013 as a discursive construct. Our topic is the emergence of new media projects, responding to the takeover of MAFRA by Andrej Babis. Three of these are being discussed: Echo24.cz, Reportér and Neovlivní.cz. The thesis aims to describe the discourse of the alternative media, its own representation in current situation. The subject is based on several concepts. First of them is the theory of social responsibility, which is a strong social value despite being quite questionable. Then, we discuss the trend of media ownership concentration and the development of Czech media after 1989, which has come to important changes, such as the change of the overall model of media ownership and the polarization of the media landscape itself. The first part of the thesis serves as a contextual background for the critical discourse analysis. The analysis verifies the hypothesis as follows: Alternative media is defined in opposition to the mainstream and uses the arguments based on the principles of the social responsibility theory to represent its own position, goals and interests. As a result, we found out, that the new projects construct an opposition us versus them as independence versus oligarchization. At the same time, the principles of..