The System of Producing Media Campaigns and Organizing Media and Journalists During the Political Trials
Abstract
This article studies the system of making media campaigns and organisation of media and journalists in political show trials against alleged enemies in totalitarian Czechoslovakia in early 1950s. The main aim of the paper is to explain interventions of state institutions and communist establishment into the work of media.
Independent press and radio broadcasting did not exist, it was controlled by state or party power. The form of media campaigns and process of journalist selection was determined by the authorities of the Ministry of Justice or the Cultural and Propagation Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
The key body in every single political trial was the press commission that regulated journalist access and swayed content of articles and commentaries published in all press. The text comes out of research of archive documents and analysis of contemporary media and explains it by way of example of the trial against representatives of the Roman Catholic Church.