ŠKODOVÁ, Markéta; ŠKRÁBOVÁ, Michala a kol. Mediální smrt konsenzu

1st ed. Prague: Metropolitan University Prague Press and Togga, 2016. ISBN 978-80-87956-53-3

The current political and media discourse pervades the idea that late modern liberal democratic society fell into a state of polarization that is hard to explain. The results of national elections, public opinion surveys exploring attitudes on fundamental issues, various referenda and random polls suggest that these societies are basically divided into two almost equal halves, which are then understood as attitudinally irreconcilable worlds. Such a polarization (resp. its media production) contributes to the inability to rely on the public communication about rational argumentation. The book Media's death of consensus takes the key of irreconcilable polarization as a starting point of its critical and analytical approach and it tries to make it a subject of a more detailed analysis. If the thesis of (unforgiving) polarization is valid, then the question is how is this polarization strengthened or weakened by media. Many thoughts on this are naturally very general and they perceive the media production as a "hyperobject", which is quite impossible to see as a whole, but in a phasing, piecemeal, incomplete way. The creative team approached this limitation and it tried to understand how irreconcilable polarization (if any) manifests itself in the media with an extremely consensual nature of its mass consumerism, in the television. The subject of interest of this publication is thus the transformation of public sphere as a space largely engrossed by mass media and related and changing shape of debates in this area. Although emphasis is placed on the TV political debate as a specific genre of audiovisual production, the authors have widened the subject by new media perspective as well.