Politics, media and manipulation: politics news and pragmaticlinguistics

The master's thesis Politics, Media and Manipulation: Political Journalism and Pragmatic Linguistics examines contemporary Czech publicized political communication using pragmatic analysis. It focuses on topics like power, ideology and self-presentation of the political participants in the media. It is also concerned with the framing of media communication and with the communication strategies that the political participants and journalists use. The research was conducted with the use of quantitative pragmatic analysis. Each sample was examined from many different angles. In this thesis, pragmatic phenomenon are examined like the function of the statements, speech acts, intertextuality, conversational maxims, the use and violation of speech etiquette, presupposition, conversational implicatures, deixis, and reference. The semiotic analysis and the examination of the context, from which the analyzed media texts originated, is involved as well. Journalistic texts from different types of media from the time of the first Czech direct presidential election have been chosen as samples for the analysis. The goal of the thesis is to design a complex pragmatic analysis and describe the used communication strategies of the participants