The Croatian media in transition, from May 4, 1980 to March 31, 1991.

摘要

This thesis reviews the framing of the Serbian ethnicity in two Croatian national daily newspapers, the Vecernji List and the Vjesnik, from May 4, 1980 to March 31, 1991. During this period, Croatia, a republic within the former Yugoslavia, underwent tremendous political and economic changes. The goal of this research was to link the changes in the framing of the Serbs to the changes in government. The findings indicate that during this period, the Croatian press transformed from the soviet communist model of the press system to an authoritarian model. In both systems, the government controlled the media, and the two analyzed newspapers reproduced the dominant nationalist ideology of the government. Until 1990, that dominant ideology was the communist one. After the first free elections, the nationalist discourse of the new president, Franjo Tudjman, and his party, the Croatian Democratic Union, prevailed.;This study uses discourse analysis to describe the frames used about Serbs. Following ten regionally important events in this 11-year period, it describes the discursive strategies in construction of a dichotomy of "us" and "them." As the pre-war polarization developed in the former Yugoslavia between Croats and Serbs, the study finds that the newspaper discourse reproduced the same polarization between "us" the Croats, and "them" the Serbs, or adversary. The study also finds that both papers follow the social conflict model of conflict escalation in their frames about the Serbs.;Because there are almost no studies that look into the role of the media in a pre-war period, this thesis contributes to the field of media studies by providing an analysis of the Croatian pre-war press. It also contributes to the studies of the press system in a post communist transition and can be used for the future studies of the media in the former Yugoslavia.