This thesis investigates the inner connection between politics and morality and the analytical challenges it has posed and still poses for political philosophy. In part one, I explore the problematic relationship between politics and morality as it has been conceived and analyzed by Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli and Weber. This exploration is a historical reconstruction, a ‘genealogy’, of four major philosophical accounts concerning the tension between the moral demands of politics and the moral demands of ‘ordinary’ life. The historical reconstruction aims at revealing the philosophical complexity of the problems that characterize the relationship between politics and morality. It is set to show that those problems have some basic perennial features which remain unresolved until nowadays. In part two, following the conclusions of the historical reconstruction, I make the central contention that the insoluble fragmentation of moral values that characterizes our world is central to the understanding of the inner connection between politics and morality. For this reason I analyze this connection from the perspective of moral pluralism, the philosophical tradition that conceives moral conflicts as the very essence of moral activity. My claim is that politics appears to be structurally opposed to specific types of moral values, because political moral values themselves are part of the fragmentation of morality. I support this claim with a further analysis of the moral divisions between the private, public and political spheres of conduct. My argument is that each of those spheres is permeated by a dominant type of moral values which is in permanent tension with the dominant types of values in the other two spheres of conduct. Finally, I make the case, that the usual aphorisms against the immorality of politicians and the famous concept of ‘dirty hands’ can be better understood when viewed as the inevitable result of the insoluble fragmentation of morality. I conclude, however, that the perennial attempts to achieve some sense of moral unity through politics indicate the special moral status we should attribute to political action.

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This research looks at how local television news framed the efforts in Iowa in 2010 and 2012 to unseat Iowa Supreme Court Justices whose 2009 ruling in the case Varnum v. Brien made Iowa the third state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage. By looking at relevant news packages and interviewing journalists, news directors, and spokespersons, I traced the way the traditionally ignored judicial retention votes became a top political story, and how particular frames entered the news. I found that despite a well-meaning intention to cover the story in a professionally acceptable fashion, these same news values and reporting rituals blinded journalists to how their attempts to provide “balance” ultimately accomplished the opposite. Evidence studied here suggested that morality politics was the dominant frame throughout most of the coverage, with the civil rights aspects of the issue mostly relegated to the day after each election rather than in the weeks prior. Political science literature defines morality politics as a campaign strategy that relies upon arguments based on “morality,” “values,” or even “sin” to motivate supporters. In the Iowa case, this concept gets modified because while the conservative campaign engaged the logics of morality politics, they also felt the need to couch their campaign in issues like “judicial activism.” I conclude the ability to get news coverage of the anti-retention campaign and get this modified morality politics framing as dominant in that coverage reveals the exercise of political and social power in defense of the hegemonic heteronormative cultural matrix.

The diploma thesis "Changes in Behaviour of Czech Media in Connection with "Political Scandals" 1997 - 2007" deals with the occurrence of so - called "mechanisms of scandalization" in media coverage of political affairs. The aim of this piece of work is to find out whether and to what extent the chosen media use these mechanisms and whether there is some recognizable change in their use over the course of time and how this change signifies. The question is to what extent the media are active force in the emergence of scandal, whether "scandalization" has become a common feature of non-tabloid Czech press.