Abstract
There were 1525 applications for asylum in the Czech Republic in 2015, and 71 people were granted asylum. Despite this fact migration was the most covered topic in the Czech media (especially television news services) in 2015. The discussed events were labelled as a wave or flood and were framed as a crisis, threat, and risk not only by the journalists but by politicians as well. This paper is based on quantitative and qualitative research on migration and war refugees from August 17, 2015 to September 18, 2015 in six news programmes of the public service broadcaster, namely the Czech Radio. It is a qualitative case study of the program Den podle… (‘Day according to…’) conducted according to steps of the grounded theory (Strauss-Corbin 1999) with the use of semiotic analysis (Chandler 2002) and discourse analysis (van Dijk 1985). We use the constructivist approach and focus on the moral panic theory (Cohen 2002 and Garland 2008) in this text. The theory emphasizes the extent of media power which contributes to social control and the strengthening of group identity through the negative representation of those who are labelled as folk devils disturbing social order. The paper argues that the representation of migration in the public service broadcasting contributed to the moral panic arousal in the researched period.
About the author
Mgr. Renáta Sedláková, Ph.D., graduated from the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University in Brno. She works as assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of Palacký University in Olomouc. She is mainly interested in the effects of media on the society of late modernity and the everyday life of its members and in practices associated with the use and consumption of popular culture. Her broader field of interest covers the representation of reality in the media, especially the case of minorities (e.g. older people, Muslims, Roma ethnic), and audience analysis. She introduced the concept of “socially insensitive messages”.
Acknowledgement
This article is a result of the internal project of Palacký University Olomouc “Theory and Analysis of Changes in Media Communication: genres–codes–media” (IGA_FF_2017_432102721), supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.
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