Paper short abstract:

The paper interprets the most influential hoaxes, fake news, conspiracy theories, contemporary legends and rumours which appeared in connection with both “waves” of coronavirus Covid-19 in ideologically divided vernacular discourse of the Czech Republic during spring and autumn of 2020.

Paper long abstract:

Czech society became polarized along lines of the so-called Café/Pub Split, the imagined divide between the pro-Western liberal urbanites and the nationalist conservative-leftist inhabitants of the rural areas at least since 2015. Back then, mass media coverage of "European refugee crisis" changed dynamics of vernacular public discussions of the Czech society; imagined cultural threat posed by refugees seemed to be one of the most crucial issues dividing the society. In 2020, new, even more popular topic emerged: global pandemics of coronavirus Covid-19. Unlike 2015, societal response to this issue became much more complicated. Ideological borders between the Café and the Pub seemed to partly dissolve, partly rearrange, and – most importantly – both “groups” started to share several identical narrative themes and motifs. Based on folkloristic fieldwork consisting of oral interviews as well as ethnography of the Czech Internet, supplemented by media content analysis, the paper tries to interpret main texts and argumentation strategies shared by both “sides” of this ideological divide. The paper analyses the most influential hoaxes, fake news and conspiracy theories which reinterpreted older folk stereotypes, and also orally-transmitted contemporary legends and rumours which appeared in connection with both “waves” of coronavirus Covid-19 in the Czech Republic during spring and autumn of 2020 .