Under Pressure
On the State of the Press in the Czech Republic
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The Czech Republic’s quality press finds itself in a difficult situation. The market is small, production costs are high, and revenues modest. Newspapers and news magazines often fail to live up to their claims of providing serious reporting. Responsibility for the tabloidization of the Czech press was long attributed to the foreign, predominantly German media houses that invested in the country in the 1990s and dominated the press market. Since the 2008 global economic crisis, these investors have pulled out. The new owners are mostly large Czech companies. But the quality of reporting has not necessarily improved. Rather, the issue of freedom of the press has become even more urgent. This applies especially to products from the publishing house MAFRA, a subsidiary of the Agrofert Group, which was founded by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš.
(Osteuropa 4-6/2021, pp. 147–164)