This compilation thesis takes a top-down perspective on the representation of different groups of people in Czech news press over three decades. The starting point is that human equality is a global prerequisite for a democratic world, according to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The research questions for the thesis concern how positively or negatively different groups of people are represented, and how often the different groups appear compared to each other. The thesis contributes results based on a language other than English, which represents a valuable contribution to the field.

Theoretically, focus is on the premise that language is a tool for gaining and maintaining power, and a way of expressing power relations (Reisigl & Wodak 2016; Fairclough 2015). An important theoretical focus is the phenomenon of linguistic othering (Fidler 2016), which here means letting a group of people stand out from a certain news description by emphasising some of their characteristics. They then form what is also called an outgroup, as opposed to the ingroup that the writer is assumed to be part of (van Dijk 1987). The findings of this thesis provide insights into how news media can influence our perceptions of, for example, different nationalities or professions, linked to their socio-economic status, and by extension how these perceptions can influence our attitudes and behaviours towards these groups.

Methodologically, the thesis uses corpus-based discourse analysis. Empirically, the research is based on the Czech National Corpus (www.korpus.cz). From this corpus, 32 million observations are extracted of when positive and negative adjectives, classified according to a subjectivity lexicon, appear in the news press together with nouns for different kinds of groups of people, such as gendered words like “woman” or “man”, occupations like “maid” or “miner” and nationalities like “Somali” or “Dane”. When adjectives are closer to nouns, or even next to them, they are given more weight than when they are more distant (Cvrček 2014). With such large amounts of data, a top-down or bird’s eye view is the most reasonable, but some detailed analyses are also included.

Study I focuses on the representation of nationalities and countries, classified by the World Bank into groups according to their gross national income, and their co-occurrence with the positive and negative adjectives. Results: the nationalities in the different income groups are represented in a descending order; the higher the national income, the more positive the representation. Furthermore, discourses related to the so-called war on terror, as well as the security of different nations, emerge as a result of the analysis.

Study II focuses on two groups, a focus group of Arabs and Muslims and a reference group of the other nationalities and countries. The focus group is a very heterogeneous group of people and countries that is often portrayed in the context of conflict (Baker et al., 2013, pp. 2 and 32). Results: Arabs and Muslims are consistently represented as an out-group, which over time affects how the people who read these news media view them.

Study III contains two sub-studies, based on an intersectional analysis of modern Czech news reporting; in one sub-study the analysis focuses on professional roles, and in the other on different nouns for women and men. Results: Those with lower socio-economic status and fewer supervisory roles in their work are less likely to appear in news coverage, but when they do appear, it is not always with more negative representations. Regarding gender, men are more often portrayed than women, and women are more often represented by evaluative adjectives than men. In addition, women’s positive representations are based to a greater extent on their appearance and feelings, while men’s representations are based on their importance and competence.

Overall, the results confirm quantitatively, with an empirical material covering almost the entire print news reporting in the Czech Republic since democratisation, that hypotheses that have been theoretically proposed, as well as confirmed, for other countries, turn out to be true for Czech news reporting. There are systematic differences in the way that some groups of people are significantly more often represented in the media than others, and that some groups are systematically represented more favourably than others. It also shows that these imbalances are clearly linked to factors such as nationality, occupation and gender.

This article presents an interdisciplinary analysis of discourses on refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and migrants (RASIM) in mainstream and alternative media in the Czech Republic. Using techniques from corpus linguistics (CL) and natural language processing (NLP) and drawing on insights from media sociology, we demonstrate the value of an interdisciplinary approach for conducting robust research that can inform policymakers and media practitioners. Our analysis of nearly one million documents from January 2015 to February 2023 reveals distinctive terms and phrases used by alternative media, highlighting the growing divergence between the mainstream and alternative media discourse and its intensity over different periods. These findings have implications for understanding the mobilization of anti-systemic groups, particularly those on the far right.

This chapter concerns the evaluation of 105 nouns denoting Arab and Muslim nationalities and countries in the Czech news media over almost 30 years, using modifying adjectives from the Czech Subjectivity Lexicon (Veselovská, Hajič and Šindlerová, 2014). It is proposed that since the persons behind these nouns form an out-group (van Dijk, 1987, p. 12) in the focus country, the way they are reflected in the media is likely to be negative, especially in times of conflict. The polarization of this chapter concerns a) countries and b) nationalities of Arabs and Muslims, on the one hand, and two reference groups on the other. Four conflicts are the focus: the war in Bosnia, the attacks on September 11, 2001, the Arab Spring of the 2010s and the Syrian civil war thereafter. This chapter studies the case of the printed press from the Czech Republic, using approximately 33 million data points extracted from the Czech National Corpus, which makes it a larger study than any previously conducted on the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in this country. The results show that Arabs and Muslims indeed receive a clearly negative portrayal that has been unbroken since 1990, with the single exception of 1995, due to the peace talks in Bosnia.

The focus of this chapter is the possible dehumanization or infra-humanization of transgender individuals through grammatical means in the Czech language. This language is rich in these features and uses a grammatical gender for persons (not based on the sex of a subject), as opposed to some, more commonly studied, languages (like English) that mark gender exclusively in pronouns. The research questions concern whether there is any misgendering by morphosyntactic means, and if so, how it is constructed, but also how misgendering is constructed, if not by morphosyntactic means. The material consists of four corpora, one in-group, one out-group, one with news texts and one with online posts of different kinds. To detect cases of misgendering in our corpora the authors look at morphosyntactic alignment within the same clauses as well as in a wider context. The result shows that the neuter pronoun ‘it’, or other neuter misgenderings, are rarely used for trans persons in Czech. Misgendering is constructed mainly by subject–predicate disagreement, but also by predicative nouns such as ‘trans men are women’. When looking for insulting expressions in Czech, the search strategy might thus require complementary parameters compared to e.g. English, enhancing the search for specific morphosyntactic features.

This article takes a bird’s eye view on how positive or negative sentiments in the news press about countries and nationality nouns seem to reflect the country’s general income groups. The study focuses on the four income groups classified by the World Bank and their co-occurrence with positively and negatively classified adjectives from the Subjectivity Lexicon for Czech. A search in the journalistic subcorpus of the SYN series, release 8 of the Czech National Corpus, results in a time line covering three decades. Previous research on subjectivity has either focused on other parts of the Subjectivity Lexicon or on fewer adjectives from other languages. In this article, it is argued that the income groups are treated in descending order, i.e. the higher the income, the more positive the sentiment. Even when the most influential groups in the top and bottom are removed, the result remains. A discourse concerning global war and peace, and the security of different nations, is also revealed as a result.

Language may be seen as a tool for constructing and confirming power structures, and a corpus analysis of adjacent words may reveal how individuals or groups of people other than the sender (writer or speaker) are depicted. These depictions frequently reveal a phenomenon known as linguistic othering. The aim of this paper is to present a corpus-based survey of the linguistic othering of Roma, Vietnamese and Ukrainian people in Czech media discourse from 1989 to 2014. The representative result is acquired by comparing neutral, positive and negative adjectives related to the three key lemmata, and a quantitative method is used to answer analytical questions about the query words in this context. Although some previous researchers have used similar methods, it appears that no such study has been performed on such a large body of material for Slavic languages. The outcome reveals how these three groups are differentiated in text, and the source material helps to demonstrate how language usage reflects the discourse of Czech society.