Eesti ühiskondliku kokkuleppe representeerimine ajalehtedes Eesti Päevaleht ja Postimees
Date
2005
Authors
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)