`Solidarity' and Media Reform in Poland

Abstract

The field of social communication is central to Solidarity's efforts to transform Poland into a self-governing commonwealth. It approaches democratic communication as communicative democracy, i.e. as a means of achieving democracy in a wider sense, and as empowerment, with right to communicate as a way of satisfying both a fundamental human need and a fundamental social need, a prerequisite of democracy. Solidarity has always gone to great lengths to develop and maintain its own above- and underground media and as long as it was beleaguered and suffered from a `bunker mentality', it seemed to favour a form of `representative communicative democracy' for its own press, with elected officers in control or in a position to intervene, if necessary. For its own purposes, therefore, it was content with less than full communicative democracy. This could be taken as an augury for Solidarity's approach to the public media once it came into power.