Means of Persvasion and Manipulation in Media Texts from the Period of COVID-19 Pandemic

This thesis aims to describe and classify means of persuasion and manipulation in Czech mainstream and anti-system media during the COVID-19 pandemic using the qualitative analysis of means of persuasion and manipulation and quantitative corpus method - keyword analysis (KWA). It is used to identify prominent units (in the case of this thesis, lemmas) by comparing the relative frequency of all words in the target (sub)corpus with the relative frequency of the same words in the reference corpus. The linguistic material was drawn from the monitoring corpus of the Czech National Corpus ONLINE1 (Cvrček & Procházka 2020) and the synchronic written corpus SYN v8 (Křen et al. 2019). The identified keywords were the basis for the subsequent qualitative analysis. The results of the research are presented in the conclusion of the thesis. Keywords mainstream media, anti-system media, COVID-19 pandemic, means of persuasion and manipulation, keyword analysis