The Illiberal Public Sphere: Media in Polarized Societies

The growing interest in studying the factors that contribute to a potential backlash against democracy has prompted the production of this meticulously researched book, which provides a much-needed focus on the cases of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Serbia.Written by researchers Vclav ttka and Sabina Mihelj, who both work at the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University, UK, it is aimed at a wider audience than academia alone.The digital version is published with open access for all, meaning there are no library costs to read it or use it in teaching.The two authors adopt a multifaceted approach, analysing the issue from different perspectives, and succeed in creating a comprehensive overview of the media situation in these countries.They also provide a framework for scholars who wish to study similar issues, either from a different perspective or focusing on other countries.The authors guide their readers through eight chapters, beginning with an introduction to the concept of the illiberal sphere and proceeding to examine specific aspects of news consumption, polarising issues, the impact of the media on news consumption during the pandemic, and the role of social media.In their concluding remarks in Chapter 9, the authors present a comprehensive and multifaceted examination of complex issues, contextualising them within a global perspective.In the introduction, however, they state that the communications perspective is "largely missing" from previous studies, and that "research typically shies away from broader theoretical reflections."Coming from corpus-assisted discourse studies, I cannot say I agree with that for the Humanities.As the readers of Scando-Slavica likely know, there are several useful articles and books analysing different media discourses in and around these countries, such as Cvrek & Fidler 2019, Benczes & Sgvri 2021, Fidler & Cvrek 2023, Mirocha 2023 and Knoblock 2020, to name some that were available before the finalisation of this book, not to mention the more general position paper on theories to analyse "ongoing processes of normalization of anti-and post-democratic action" by Krzyanowski et al. (2023).The authors' framework is elaborated from the premise that illiberal tendencies were prevalent in this region in the wake of democratic elections held after the fall of the Iron Curtain in and around 1989.Since then, democracy has been called into question not only in countries such as India and Brazil, but also in the United Kingdom and the USA.