The newspaper headline is the first contact between the author and the recipient and in terms of stylistics, it is one of the compositional aspects of the text. In relation to the text itself, as well as to the communication partner, the headline fulfils an informative, engaging and especially in journalistic genres, persuasive function. Following the previous research focused on the 1960s, the aim of the study is to analyse and compare headlines in Slovak newspapers in the period of totalitarian and democratic establishment with a focus on the journalistic genre. The research sample, excerpted from the official discourse of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1948 – 1956, 1961 – 1970) and the more recent Slovak mainstream