Abstract
Czech media landscape has experienced profound transformation in the past decade through the increased domestic media-concertation on one hand and the rapid emergence of the alternative news outlets on the other. The functioning and role of this new hybrid media system during the European refugee crisis has served as a basis for fierce public and academic debates and several key areas are not well understood.
For instance, how did this change influence journalistic perceptions and legitimizing strategies in the context of the European refugee crisis reporting (Lecheler and Kruikemeier 2016; Shoemaker and Reese 2014)? How have these developments impacted the framing and mediated populism in the immigration coverage (Kostadinova 2015; Humprecht and Esser 2016; Aalberg et al. 2017)? While some studies of media coverage regarding the refugee crisis have been conducted in the Czech environment (Tkaczyk 2017; Tkaczyk, Pospech, and Macek 2015), their scope has been so far limited to few media outlets devoid of closer qualitative examination. This research aims to examine the impact of this transformation on the news coverage of the refugee crisis through the use of the quantitative content analysis of 15 mainstream and alternative news outlets and semi-structured interviews with journalists.
The findings will contribute to the empirical literature in media sociology and political communication on the divergence in journalistic cultures, role perceptions and mediated populism in the alternative and mainstream media. The first preliminary data are expected in December 2018, in time to be presented at the Summer School.