At the 11th European Communication Conference (ECC 2026), hosted this year by Masaryk University in Brno, Jan Motal presented joint research conducted with CEMETIK members and collaborators Lucie Čejková, Vojtěch Dvořák and Matěj Richtr. Their paper, Normalizing asymmetry of suffering in Czech television discussions of Gaza, was presented in the panel Witnessing at a Distance: Practices, Ethics, and Politics of Mediated Suffering.
The study asks how Czech public-service television makes Israeli and Palestinian suffering differently visible and intelligible. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of 111 segments of Czech Television’s current-affairs programme Události, komentáře (Events, Comments), the authors examine not only who appears as a victim, but how suffering is named, how agency and responsibility are distributed, and which political subjects become imaginable behind the suffering.
The analysis identifies a recurring asymmetry. Israeli suffering tends to be individualized, emotionally foregrounded and linked to clearly identified perpetrators, while Palestinian suffering is more often rendered through the language of casualties, numbers, humanitarian conditions and population management. The asymmetry is also reproduced through grammatical agency and through broader civilizational and security frames. The authors therefore argue that the issue is not simply unequal attention to different victims, but the different discursive conditions under which their suffering becomes recognizable, mournable and politically meaningful.
The presentation is available here.