Abandoned media - freedom of speech and the transformation of society's representation in the media in comparison of the late 1960s and today
Abstract
During the 1960s, freedom of speech in the broadest sense of the word was liberated in Czechoslovakia, to varying degrees in both parts. In framing the significance of this period, freedom of speech is a basic precondition for social reforms for journalists and, more broadly, intellectuals, and thus, even in retrospect, it even becomes a central theme of the Czechoslovak 1960s and the Prague Spring in particular.
Its fulfillment, defense and critique of its immensity gradually became the subject of a truly societal debate in the summer weeks of 1968. The author's work devoted to this issue entitled Thinking Socialism without Tanks.
Freedom of speech in the center of interests of the Czechoslovak year 1968 (2013) provides an insight into the thought, value and motivational framework of the leading speakers of this debate. Also today, freedom of speech and the defense of democracy through it, in connection with the unprecedented interconnection of political and economic power in the media, is once again a societal, albeit contradictory, topic.
The values and attitudes held by today's active participants in this debate, especially journalists, are examined in a recent, unique publication by editors Jaromír Volek and Marina Urbániková Czech Journalists in a comparative perspective. Hybrid, vanishing and virtual journalists in the post-transformation phase (2017).
The subject of the study will therefore be the continuity and change in the perception of the value of freedom of speech by publishing authors and the self-perception of these actors at the forefront of the society in the late 1960s in Czechoslovakia and the present day Czech Republic using author's own study and the book of Volek and Urbániková. The author will also try to explain the impact of the value of freedom of speech in public debate and the importance of this value for its most active users compared to the rest of society on the changing perceptions of the role of journalists and wider public intellectuals in society in the late 1960s. with societal support, and today, when mutual mistrust is growing between the media and society as a whole.