Pink vs. Brown : How Conservative Journalists Perceive Liberals and vice versa

Abstract

Contemporary social cultural and ethical discourse both in Slovakia and around the world is marked by the depth of the antagonism between conservatives and progressive liberals, with disputes characterized by mutual accusations of bigotry and prejudice, even extending to hatred. In such a climate, it would therefore be interesting to examine how the two sides of the ideological divide perceive the other and to identify the common internal reasons for the patterns of thought and behavior which they attribute to each other. This study investigates the issue using the classical attributive method on a sample of 543 newspaper opinion pieces (either editorials and columns) from conservative and liberal media sources in Slovakia. The texts are identified, quantified and compared based on “inputs” (the cultural-ethical themes of the articles), “outputs” (the attitudes of the authors) but especially the “attributes” themselves (the character traits attributed to the opposition). At the same time, the study also analyses the lexical-semantic aspect of the examined texts. The author combines qualitative and quantitative research methods in order to outline three general conclusions about the liberal-conservative relationship in Slovakia but also in a broader Central and Eastern European and global context: 1. the difference in perceptions of social and personal threats; 2. the integral role of the Church and Christianity in the dispute; 3. the division of the roles of older and younger “brother”.