Abstract
The book describes the associational life of Czech journalists in the relatively free period of the so-called Third Republic (years 1945-1948). We would find few areas in which the post-war Czechoslovak society approached the totalitarian organization of the post-February 1948 years as strongly as it did in the media, and especially in the organization of journalism as a professional and trade union.
However, the union of journalists did not participate in these changes alone, the book also points its relationship to other relevant institutions; the Ministry of Information played a crucial role in the media, the ROH (national trade union center) also played an important role. The very close personal connections of the journalist management with the leadership of these institutions then broadly defined the direction in which journalists' lives were to develop after 1945.
The positive attitude towards the ideology promoted by the Communist Party in February 1948 manifested itself in minimal media activation of the pro-democracy-minded part of the public and the subsequent relatively smooth assumption of power not only in the media but also in the political sphere. In dealing with his subject, Cebe relies on a careful, comprehensive study of archival materials, professional literature, memoirs, and contemporary texts.
The logical structure of the book proceeds chronologically, but its independent chapters, although they are in no way isolated, analyze all the main actors and events in the life of postwar journalistic organizations. The author provides the reader with a number of provocative but well-founded and well-supported new viewpoints.
For example, he highlights a range of practices and methods from the time of the Nazi occupation that were applied not only to the building of postwar journalistic organizations but also to the management and functioning of the media as a whole.