In the News
Delineation of Pervez Musharraf in the Time Magazine 2001-2010
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ayisha Khurshid
The coalition between the US and Pakistan on the war on terror in the wake of 9/11 terrorist attacks have been researched well across various disciplines. As the Pakistani President as well as military General Pervez Musharraf has been one of the key figures of this alliance, there is a need to probe if he is presented as a hardcore or a dubious ally, and what does such coverage reveal about the magazine’s policy towards Pakistan. For scrutinizing the delineation of Musharraf, the corpus comprising of 509 articles (published in the Time magazine form September 11, 2001 to Dec 2010) has been formulated. Further his presentation is analysed via Wordsmith concordance program, and Graph Coll. The collocates with the core Musharraf* (the Noun-Noun combination) are further categorized into semantic categories using corpus assisted critical discourse analysis. Using the notions of semantic preference and prosody, the study reveals that Musharraf’s identity is fostered as a politician rather than as a military man. Moreover, there is strong association between him and the President Bush. This notion is further strengthened statistically (p < 0.05). He is also presented as a figure engulfed in variant problems. Such projection where there is silence on the democracy till 2007 is in alliance with the US foreign policy towards Musharraf and Pakistan in general. It means that mirror model of news production is not the magazine’s policy and the media understudy has political alliances with the US government.
Media and Politics: Czech Periodical on the Borderline with Hitler´s Germany
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marie Štěpánová
In the time of the rising power of Nazism, the tension was mounting in German-speaking and ethnically mixed border areas of Czechoslovakia, the notorious “Sudetendland”. Periodicals such as “Our Minorities“ (later “Our Boundaries”) tried to support small and often isolated Czech communities on the frontier, which were “minorities” within their own country. In a European context, Czechoslovakia was one of the last islands of democracy before the outbreak of WW2. The paper is based on original research and presents the role of interwar serial information distribution, while at the same time connecting and supporting the Czech minority in Nord-East Bohemia. It provides information about publishing, the personalities responsible for the monthly periodical, and the creators of its content. Using a method of historical analysis, it summarizes the purpose and character of a First Republic periodical, published between 1920 and 1938. This was an era shortly after the proclamation of the newborn Republic of Czechoslovakia (1918), which was dealing with the consequences of WWI and heritage of the previous monarchy, and only months after one of the biggest disillusions of modern Central European history, that of the Munich Treaty (1938), which fatally affected the lives of all Czech citizens in the researched area of Sudetenland, and also therefore the lives of the periodical, its authors and readers. The research shows how the periodical reflected an atmosphere of totalitarianism in Europe during times of threatened democracy that seems to have much in common with the current situation in some areas of Central Europe.
