| Summary: | Diploma thesis "The Hero of Totalitarian Media: The Comparative Analysis of Emil Zátopek's Olympic Victories (1948, 1952)" deals with propaganda in the sports journalism. Its aim is to evaluate how the Czechoslovak press reported about successes of one of the best domestic athlet Emil Zatopek at the Olympic Games in London and Helsinki. I defined a hypothesis, based on specialized literature and observation, that journalists exploited Zatopek's triumphs for propagandistic reasons, and presented the successful athlet as a socialist hero. I verified this hypothesis by means of quantitative content analysis of the journals Rude pravo and Lidova demokracie. I defined two secondary hypothesis as well: The news coverage of the Olympic Games in 1952 was more propagandistically damaged than the Olympic Games in 1948, and the news coverage by Rude pravo of both Olympic Games was more propagandistically damaged than by Lidova demokracie. In the analysis I measure the propagandistic damage of the articles, the photos and the representations of Emil Zatopek. The whole research has a deep theoretical background, which includes a definition of propaganda, an outline of the cultural policy 1948-1952, and a definition of the "hero" concept based on different conceptions from both sides of the Iron Curtain.
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