Buying a Gun not to Use it? A Study of the Change in Czech Media Ownership and its Political Instrumentalisation
Abstrakt
This article covers changes to media ownership in the former Eastern Bloc, which first started in the 1990s (de-nationalisation, privatization, the entry of foreign owners), and then by other changes brought by the economic crisis after 2008 (the fleeing of foreign owners, the rise of domestic capital). In the Czech Republic we can talk about another, the third stage of media ownership from 2013, when Andrej Babiš, became the owner of the MAFRA Publishing House.
The theoretical debate of our contribution looks at the first two historical stages and discusses point-by-point the individual concepts that the literature mentions in this context (party-press parallelism, Italianisation) and some of which may be in conflict with the normative expectations placed on the media in democratic and pluralist societies (business parallelism, impure publishing, instrumentalisation). The subsequent empirical part of the paper is dedicated to this "third stage" of media ownership in the Czech Republic.
The method of quantitative content analysis focuses on Babiš's two dailies, MF Dnes and Lidové noviny, and, by comparison with the contents of other dailies, examines whether there has been political instrumentalisation that has robbed them of their independence so that they side with their owner. The research - in comparison with both expert and public opinion - produced surprising results.
Although media siding was measured with the aid of openly expressed sympathy for various political actors or by measuring the attention devoted to each political actor and their arguments, almost no tendency towards partisanship was recorded. The input hypothesis about the pernicious impact of merging political and media power in democratic public debate was found to be false.
Interpretation of these results, however, does not mean this danger should not be heeded, and offers three possible explanations as to why there has been no political instrumentalisation in this area so far.