Abstract

Broadcast media participate relentlessly in our daily lives, influencing our formation of knowledge and attitudes. Media discourse changes over the years, and the media image itself endures, albeit fragmented and not always matching reality. The series Black and White World presented the audience, during its four broadcast seasons, a twentieth-century context, specifically that of the nineteen-eighties, reconstructing fragments of a time through musical creativity, certain actors, and its social context. Within this format, a valuable research source was developed out of efforts to analyze those moments that the authors focused the most on. The goals of our research are focused on analysis of the range of represented topics related to and within the context of the eighties, as well as analysis of the description of certain topics, the way they had settled in the plot, and everyday life. Thus, from the methodological aspect, content analysis commenced. The unit of analysis covered the first season of twelve episodes retrospectively, back to 1980. In addition to content analysis, a survey was conducted with the aim of analyzing acceptance of the series by the audience through an online survey comprising a sample of 143 respondents during July and August 2021; we examined how viewers accepted the series, whether the respondents approached media content critically, whether they expressed the need to conduct research on this topic, and whether the respondents felt ignored when shaping collective memories and perception of the past.