Red danger before elections: Trick or threat?

Before the parliamentary election in 2006 we focused on the tendency of the Czech soci- ety and especially media to exclude one of the parliamentary parties – the Communist Party – from the government and to actively construct its status as specific. We designate this tendency as anti-com- munism, a word commonly used in the Czech political communication. According to our outcomes, anti-communism was a remarkable trend at the pages of at least three Czech dailies: Mladá Fronta DNES, Lidové noviny and Hospodářské noviny. The anti-communism as performed in their content was not only a media representation of an all-society phenomenon. It was actively constructed and supported by the journalists, editors and publicists of these dailies. Especially the two fi rst mentioned newspapers can be perceived as actively anti-communist media both in the sense of their own involve- ment (the agenda setting, the content of editorials, etc.) and the manifest support of anti-communist voices (even PR information at the news pages). Právo, the fourth analyzed newspaper, can be by contrast characterized as anti-anticommunist or at least anti-antileftist trying to construct a more positive image of the Communist Party and challenging the anti-communist tendencies