The new post-modern theory of mass media as elaborated by Jean Baudrillard makes the provocative claim that the media representation of social reality is the very mode of its disappearance. In this essay, using Baudrillard's theory, the author analyses the production of news on the war in Bosnia by American TV networks and argues for a local rather than global representation of social reality. While the edited words and images on the television screen produce fake realities, there are specific practical conditions behind their production that can be described and analysed as a locally produced social reality. To prove this point, the author draws on two sets of data. The first contains two news reports by 'ABC News' (American Broadcasting Corporation) about the war in Bosnia, each of which uses the same image of a sniper: in the first report, he is identified as a Bosnian Muslim, in the second, as a Bosnian Serb. The fact that the same image may signify two mutually exclusive identities is an example of fake news created by means of specific editing practices. The second set of data consists of a television news broadcast in which the author appears as a translator for a Bosnian woman. The author compares the edited news footage with the event as he actually experienced it and argues that the falsification of this 'news' occurred, with his complicity, in response to a particular contingency of the moment.
This report on Czech participation in international comparative socioeconomic survey research is primarily aimed at providing useful information on the sources of data available for secondary analysis in sociology. Mainly the infrastructural role of international projects is examined in this regard. The author provides a complete list of multinational continuous sample-survey programmes that have public domain databases and include Czech data, and he also presents a selection of projects in other areas (one-time international surveys, comparative official statistics, events data, etc.). A significant proportion of all current social research in the Czech Republic involves participation in international projects. In academic research most of the available survey data that are suitable for monitoring change are from international projects. However, for some topics and types of research - for example, socio-economic household panel research, and research on migration, communication or the ageing of the population -there is little or no comparable data available.