Takács, Róbert will explore the transformation of journalism as a profession during the socialist period in Hungary, including the legacy of the prewar journalism and journalism between 1945 and 1947, as well as the reception of Soviet/Eastern journalism and Western media and media theory.
He will also study the ethos of journalism and typical forms of work and aims. He will consider who/what was the reference group for journalists (“politics” vs. the “public”) and how this reference group changed. His work will consider the various types and levels of socialist journalism in Hungary, such as propagandist, investigative, factory, local, informative, tabloid, youth, etc., including the representation of workplace societies in factory newspapers and the “newspaper editorial” itself as a specific workplace. Takács will examine the ways in which different types of journalists and editors served as representatives of a middle-rank political agency who were political in their texts, taking an intermediate position between state propaganda and reader expectations (“voice from below”) in the middle of the hierarchy (cf. Roudakova 2017).
Keywords: journalism, professional standards, professionalization, incentives, second economy