Under Pressure
On the Situation of the Czech Press
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
In the Czech Republic, the situation of quality journalism is in a bad way. Newspapers and news magazines often cannot do justice to their claims of serious reporting. Responsibility for the tabloidisation was for a long time attributed to the foreign, mainly German media houses that had invested in the Czech Republic in the 1990s and dominated the press market. Since the global economic crisis in 2008, these investors have withdrawn. The new owners are mostly leading Czech entrepreneurs. But the quality of the reporting has not gotten better. The question, how free the press is, has become even more urgent. This applies in particular to newspapers published by the media company MAFRA, which belongs to the Agrofert Group owned by Andrej Babiš, a leading entrepreneur and the Czech Republic’s finance minister.
(Osteuropa 11-12/2016, pp. 103–118)