Abstract
Magazine editor
Journalists wait outside a closed door at parliament’s press gallery in Warsaw, January 2017
CREDIT: Slawomir Kaminiski/Reuters
To a political commentator and editor like me, who has worked in journalism for 14 years, there are challenges on all levels. In the editorial teams of Res Publica and Visegrad Insight, journals about culture and politics, we face all sorts of dilemmas.
The first and most important dilemma arose shortly after the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) government effectively took over control of public service media by giving themselves powers to appoint the heads of state broadcasters.
Our quandary was then whether we should accept invitations to appear on public radio and TV programmes where our presence as independent commentators might suggest that government-controlled outlets were impartial. Or whether not to appear, which would mean we ignored part of the public which is still their audience. We decided to take part in public debates and trained ourselves to keep focused on the issues we mostly deal with, while avoiding partisan debates.
Lack of transparency and limited access to information does not help produce better quality journalism. On the contrary, in the mediocre media world we inhabit, it is hard to imagine that there will be less reporting or less news. Media outlets compete for attention and will continue to produce articles, even if their sources become less credible.
There will be more secret recordings, leaks and gossip, instead of fact-checked news. Verifying facts will become an even greater challenge. We are therefore trying to build up our data by relying on in-house research, instead of more interaction with public administrators. This has its limits. At the end of the day we still ask politicians and public officials for comment, while expecting them to be less responsive.
In fact, the Polish government is officially reducing our access to politicians and public officials. On 15 December 2016 the chancellery of the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, introduced new regulations allowing only two media correspondents per outlet to observe and report on parliamentary proceedings.
In response media across all non-governmental platforms organised a protest and on 17 December journalists’ accreditations were suspended for an indefinite period and they were not admitted to the building for the final proceedings of the budget session.
The protest quickly turned into a political spectacle, and became a struggle between the opposition, which was arguing for the media to have access to parliamentary proceedings, and the government. Opposition politicians protested by recording selected events, but their antics and portrayal of themselves as victims meant the case for a free media took a back seat.
The outcome of the protests remains unclear. On the one hand the media ban on reporting parliamentary proceedings has been lifted, but further sanctions on media freedom are expected.
Another major challenge for Polish journalism comes from the business side. Like in other countries, it is becoming increasingly difficult to financially sustain many media outlets. Today direct sales, subscriptions and donations from readers provide only about 15% of income for magazines like ours. Public grants provide some 30%, and the rest come from a variety of private sources such as media partnerships.
The system of public subsidies that used to support independent cultural journalism is even less transparent than it was. And there are new ideological criteria on the horizon, which demand that culture which is subsidised promotes a certain kind of Polish nationalism. So, it worries us that we may end up relying on private money alone. We are concerned that our attempts to report and promote culture as we see fit will be underfunded.
Sustainability could lie with foreign donors, but we worry that access to such funding will also soon be under threat as it has been in Hungary. There, new governmental policies are attempting to curtail the activities of foreign-backed civil society groups. Already reports from March 2017 quote Barbara Bublin from PiS as saying efforts will be taken to remove foreign influence from media.
And in Poland, as in Hungary, public subsidies are made available nearly exclusively to new private media owned by businessmen with direct links to the ruling party. Public broadcasting is being taken over by the government, and attempts to gain freedom of information are being hampered by new legal restrictions.
The government is promoting start-up “news” outlets such as Gazeta Polska Codziennie daily and TV Republika that were actively supportive in the election campaign.
At the same time, they are freezing out established media outlets that have not been adhering to PiS’s point of view such as Gazeta Wyborcza daily, Newsweek Polska weekly and TVN channel.
Our government has also stopped publicly financed institutions, such as ministries, agencies, courts and diplomatic missions, subscribing to press titles that would, in the past, have been considered mainstream, while decreeing they take out new subscription orders with pro-government media.
It is true to say that the previous government favoured the mainstream media by subsidising outlets with lucrative advertisements for public companies or government-sponsored public policy information campaigns. But what we are seeing now is some titles actually banned from public institutions.
With approximately 240,000 civil servants employed by national government (and similar numbers in local government) this makes a lot of difference to a daily or weekly press where circulation is at best 180,000 in the case of Newsweek Polska, or 200,000 for Gazeta Wyborcza.
By way of justification, Deputy Minister of Justice Patryk Jaki said in early January 2016 that some titles have always had a privileged position and now the government will make sure that there will be a change in the order of privileges.
The same month the government assigned Jacek Kurski, a politician, former MP and at that time the deputy minister of culture (as well as the brother of the deputy editor of Gazeta Wyborcza) to be head of public TV. People in Poland watch on average 4.23 hours of television per day, the highest in Europe, so maintaining its autonomy is crucial.
Along with public TV, public radio statutes have been changed to enable the takeover by government supporters of executive boards, in direct violation of the role of the bi-partisan committee that previously supervised the quality of public broadcasting.
Many journalists who are not supportive of the government have been fired and the remaining ones are under threat of being fired.
Neither public outrage, nor a decline in Poland’s place on media freedom indexes – Poland tumbled 29 places down the Reporters without Borders World Press Freedom Index this year – has halted the long march through the institutions by the government.
Moreover, the government is planning to introduce new taxes to support its own TV and radio: the number of viewers, along with economic performance, has been drastically falling over the last year. To this end it will most probably try to introduce new forms of privileged access for the media it favours, and hamper the freedom of information rights and the business of media independent from government.
Effectively, that could produce a more partisan media. It may very well be a calculation and part of the political communication strategy of powerful ex-prime minister and chair of PiS Jarosław Kaczyński, who, like many others, profits from polarisation.
A chance this strategy could fail may lie in some outlets keeping up good unbiased reporting. A promising sign of public reaction to such a strategy comes from recent reports about the independent weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, which noted a 16% increase in circulation. Its editor believes this was a result of demand for good impartial journalism. Even though the numbers are not significantly changing the odds on the market, it may be one of few ways public opinion will retain access to good quality journalism.
One can only hope that this is part of a wider public response against these attempts to manipulate their news and knowledge.
Cases in Point
Maciej Kluczka, a journalist at Poznan’s branch of the government-controlled station Radio Merkury, was dismissed as host of the morning talk-show Kluczowy Temat after a critical interview with MP Ryszard Czarnecki
The new chair of the Polish constitutional court, Julia Przyłębska, announced a ban on all photography, sound and film recordings from hearings in the court’s smaller hall
The ruling party of the Polish government blocked journalists from recording a vote on next year’s budget, by organising it outside the main chamber of parliament Source: mappingmediafreedom.org