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By declaring themselves pro-Europeans, opposition parties made a crucial U-turn in their strategy. Their strategic calculus was quite a simple one - neither more nor less can we be EU-oriented than you, Democrats. Besides, it costs us nothing. The same applies to all other strategies. As they are usually declarative, there is no reason whatsoever why not to take them over from you. Why not copy your slogans such as those about regional cooperation, fight against corruption and organized crime, social justice and, of course, state and national interests? These lofty goals being nothing but propaganda, why should we leave them to Democrats the more so since they are not even trying to achieve them? Democrats' failure was, therefore, guaranteed the same as voters' disappointment in them, all of which resulted in electoral defeat. The only alternative strategy in all this is to come up with an alternative that might put off even grudging voters.
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The victory of the Serb Progressive Party and its leader, Tomislav Nikolic, in May 2012 elections laid bare Serbia's grim reality: Serb nationalism is a constant. The international community's political engineering had reached the point after which it was ineffective. Once again it became clear that the changes in 2000 had been cosmetic and touched not the foundation of Milosevic's legacy. All attempts at changing this legacy were brutally curbed (assassination of Zoran Djindjic, consequent ruination of the Democratic Party...
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The article describes the process of so called „Soviet nation” building. Using the contemporary western theories (multiculturalism, invention of tradition, constructivist approach to the nation-building process), the author discusses this process as a trial of political nation building but – at the same time – neglecting of the policy of recognition. The catalogue of common “soviet people’s” values promoted by the Communist Party (common communism building, victory over the fascism) and the specific characteristics of “socialist nations” are also presented.
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The subject of the article is Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of mystical participation, which was used by him to explain “strange” non-European cultural phenomena from the perspective of the European scientific rationality. This approach, modified by Stanley Tambiah, was used in the article to explain a natural disaster, here – floods, which took place in southern Poland in 2010. The empirical material are the discussions on the Internet, which perceive the cause of flooding in the interference of various external forces, which are ascribed the extraordinary characteristics (the government of one of the neighboring countries, the divine punishment, etc.). This mode of thought is similar to the structures of magical thinking present in non-European societies described by Levy-Bruhl. The above leads to the conclusion that the idea of mystical participation is not characteristic only for primitive pre-logic, but is present in the minds and practice of contemporary Westerners.
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In paper ‘Monitors of the Czechoslovak News Agency or What Interested the Communist Regime in the Radio Free Europe Broadcasting Station’ analyses the so-called ‘monitors’, i.e., the daily transcripts of radio broadcasts given by the Western radio stations. The authors of these monitors were employees of a special department of the Czechoslovak News Agency, and the recipients were a narrow circle of people, mainly from the political and media environment of communist Czechoslovakia. Using more than 200 monitors, broadcasted in three historical periods, we have analysed the form and, above all, the contents of these monitors and we have described, analysed and interpreted what the communist regime and its representatives were so interested in regarding the broadcasting of the Radio Free Europe station.
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Jakub Macek: Poznámky ke studiu nových médií. Brno: Masarykova univerzita 2013. 199 stran. ISBN 978-80-210-6477- 5 (online: pdf). Jan Křeček: Politická komunikace. Od res publica po public relations. Praha: Grada Publishing 2013. 176 stran. ISBN 978-80-247-3536-8 Jan Tomandl: Public relations a zpravodajství: Vliv hluboké proměny žurnalistiky na teorii a praxi vztahů s médii. Zlín: VeRBuM 2012. 153 s.
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The research paper deals with media representation of apocalyptic predictions. It aims at describing how the apocalypse is represented/constructed in media discourse and what functions the apocalyptic predictions may perform. The theoretical background is highly interdisciplinary: the research is formed and inspired by the concepts of Carl Gustav Jung´s analytical psychology and by the historical context of the apocalyptic visions, including contemporary theories of collapse. Moreover, the paper associates classic anthropological conceptualisations of ritual, as well as the psychoanalytical/sociological notion of ontological security, with the media- apocalyptic seriality. The research paper employs a discourse analytical approach suggested by James Paul Gee, enhanced by selected Jungian categories, for in-depth comparative analysis of printed and online media texts dealing with the return of Halley´s comet in 1910 and the end of Mayan calendar in 2012. The paper suggests that – by various forms of ritualizing the apocalyptic events´ prediction – the media have the potential to symbolically revitalize the society and strengthen ontological security of its members. The objects of prediction (the comet and the calendar in this case) can actually serve as objects of projection of collectively unconscious anxieties, activated by social-political context. However, the research suggests that the media discourse on apocalypse articulates a historically invariable cause of the apocalypse – the self-destructive tendencies of the human race.
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This article explores how the Czech female and male audiences of television soap opera The Surgery in the Rose Garden construct their gender identities in relation to their interpretations of the show’s characters. It takes the paradigm of interpretative sociology for its starting point and uses the methods of ethnographic approach to gender. Its theoretical background comprises gender theories of audience of the “women’s genres”. The research was conducted from 2006 to 2011 targeting the male and female viewers of The Surgery in the Rose Garden in the city of Šumperk. The methods used were in-depth interviews, group interviews and participant observation. The research also concerned part of the production of this soap opera, particularly its creative team. The article shows how members of the audience work with gender categories and how they “do” and “display” gender in their own lives.
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The present contribution represents a partial research probe into the problems of the theory of codified language and linguistic culture of the contemporary Slovak language applied to the practice of mass media communication. On the basis of the analysed language material, we relativize the frequently cited argument of unflattering or even disrepair status of use of the Slovak language in public journalistic sphere. On the contrary, by means of linguistic-stylistic interpretation of the four editions of main news programme of RTVS/Slovak Television, we prove that language culture of particular assessed presenters/anchors and editors is at the relatively good level, as their public utterances do not significantly violate the current valid codification standard.
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The advent of rock music in sixties has fundamentally changed the entire field of popular music all over the world including Czechoslovakia. Rock music played an irreplaceable social role, especially in relation to young generations who were using it as a significant voice of their feelings. The evolving area of rock music did not correspond to its professional reflection in official mass media. Serious rock music journalism significantly developed only at the end of the sixties. In the period of normalization, the Czechoslovak communist government restarted to hold rigidly to Marxist- Leninist ideology in its political and cultural practise. This turn also resulted in a new official approach to rock music characterised by differentiated forms of media regimentation including prescriptive media coverage the rock music or massive reduction of popular music periodicals. The article is focuses on the description of music journalism training based on university studies as well as on less formal ways of further training provided by interest groups or illegal platforms in the period of normalisation. This article also attempts to give deeper thought into how the area of rock music can become ideologically an unwanted way of making a living.
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