Regional dimension of security and accidents and their TV reflection in the Czech Republic

Abstract

The information provided by the media can be related to plenty of entities including individuals, organizations as well as territories of various kinds and scales. Indeed, images of individual communities, regions as well as whole countries are increasingly being shaped just by the media. The role of TV coverage is indispensable in this context as it has the most intense impact on the wide public. Moreover, TV news reporting agenda to a great extent embodies also press or radio coverage agenda. This paper aims at evaluating whether the selected attributes of the real life in NUTS III regions in the Czech Republic find their adequate portrayals in the regionally-related contributions appearing within the national TV news reporting. The share of news concerning the given topic in individual regions should correspond to the presence of the theme in territorial statistics. This article will attempt to uncover the intensity of the above mentioned correspondence. The previously accomplished qualitative researches have revealed that the thematic categories of security and accidents represent nearly half of the topics in regionally-related contributions within the national TV coverage. Both security and accidents themes are distributed unevenly within the national TV news reporting. The key issue is whether spatial differentiation appearing in the TV news reporting reflects the real territorial figures and statistics, i.e., the amount of criminal offences and traffic accidents. Criminal offences and road casualties are both geographically differentiated, but does TV coverage reflect this differentiation in an objective and adequate way? The answer can be derived from this paper. Arguably, the relation between the TV news reporting and regions, which is stated only seldom, will attract higher attention in the near future.