Eesti ühiskondliku kokkuleppe representeerimine ajalehtedes Eesti Päevaleht ja Postimees

Date

2005

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Tartu Ülikool

Abstract

Description

Estonian public understanding agreement, made between three sectors, aims at reaching a common understanding about the most vital development lines for Estonia. It is important to study representations of this agreement, because in a democratic society, media is responsible for reflecting the events and processes taking place in society, thereby influencing the attitudes of society towards these events and processes. Today, people receive information about their society mainly from media, that is, media influences how people see and understand the world. Although people can also exercise influence on media by restricting it with common value judgements and principles, media applies opposite pressure with its representations or images of reality. In this process, the choices made by journalists may come to prevail, since collecting information, selecting and processing it, transmitting it to audiences, is what their everyday work consists of. What kind of a representation of the events and processes of the society reaches the public, depends to a great extent on the subjective choices made by journalists. This thesis studies the representations of the Estonian public understanding agreement in Estonian newspapers Päevaleht and Postimees in the period of October 15, 2000 to October 20, 2003. The task of the study was to analyse and explain, how these two newspapers (considered to be quality papers) fulfilled their task of integrating the Estonian society. The method of analysis is qualitative text analysis. Empirical results are based on 51 articles in Postimees and 43 articles in the printed version of the main paper of Päevaleht. Public understanding agreement was the main topic of news reports and opinion stories. The front page of Postimees gave references to the same amount of both news reports and opinion stories. Eesti Päevaleht highlighted mainly news on its front page. The main supportive arguments to the public understanding agreement were the social guarantees, improvements in the field of education and science, and the need for a stabilized development of Estonian economy. Negative arguments were the bad formulation of the text, missing consensus between the participants and mistrust towards the initiators of the agreement. One of the main conclusions of the study is that the Estonian print media represented the public understanding agreement as a document drawn up between politicians. Politicians were used most often as sources, they were also considered as the main interested party by the media. The second conclusion is that the agreement was represented as lacking legitimation, with the biggest problem being the missing consensus of participants and missing trust towards the initiators of the agreement. The third conclusion is that the media prioritized the problems related to the agreement at the expense of explaining the idea of the agreement. The voice given to representatives of private sector and grassroot organisations was marginal compared to the share of those in power. The fourth conclusion was that the making of the public understanding agreement was represented to the public in a negative context. The evaluations given to the process of making the agreement and the headlines were often explicitly or implicity derogative. The general conclusion of the bachelor's thesis is that the Estonian print media did not reflect the making of the public understanding agreement in a balanced way, since both newspapers gave most space to the views of politicians, the opinions of entrepreneurs and grassroot organisations were almost missing. In that aspect, Postimees and Päevaleht did not function as an effective and democratic forum as they should have been. The results of the thesis confirmed the ideas that arose from previous studies (Nurk ja Ojaveer 2004). It also came out that the public agreement was represented to a large extent as a so-called president's agreement. This suggests ideas for further studies whether the public understanding agreement was actully an image campaign for the president.

Keywords

H Social Sciences (General), bakalaureusetööd, ühiskondlik leping, ajakirjandus, trükiajakirjandus, representatsioon, Eesti, Eesti Päevaleht (ajaleht), Postimees (ajaleht)

Citation