The following paper represents the results of several years´ research focused on the topic of politically and ideologically motivated transformations of mass media images of two Spanish personalities - Federico García Lorca and José Ortega y Gasset - in the Czechoslovak cultural environment during the communist dictatorship (1948-1989). Within the research, it was discovered that the presentation of the above mentioned writers in the Czechoslovak press was considerably influenced by the current political and ideological demands of government power. Therefore, specific examples of the changing mass media image of both men will be shown and the attention will be drawn to the fact that during the forty years of existence of the dictatorial regime, the political pressure for ideological unification of mass media images was far from uniformity. Actually, time niches in which the space for free expression in the press opens up in a surprising way have been discovered. At the same time, the purpose of our contribution is to show how important was the role of specific totalitarian state language in generating the mentioned images, which we demonstrate on some specific examples.
Based on the analysis and interpretation of several hundred Czechoslovak newspaper and magazine articles from the given period, the aim was to approach understanding the mechanism of how to work with historical memory for political order and, at the same time, to reveal what effects it may have on perceiving the topic among the population that in large measure relies on mediators / manipulators of memory images from a different cultural environment. The paper derives from the conviction that similar research is relatively important even today because the mass media are increasingly creating a virtual information universe, which stimuli notably intervene in the tangible reality of our lives. The partial study dedicated to how the mass media are able to significantly manipulate the memory images of characters, events and past phenomena, perhaps can represent one of the stones eventually forming an overall and clear mosaic of the role of the mass media in creating our individual perception of reality - the present one as well as the past one and partly, hopefully, the future one.
