‘You want content verifiers working with us? The media represent the biggest bunch of hypocrites you can imagine. Journalists don’t want truth checking, they want ethical spine!’ Iwona’s critique could also be sturdy, but it surely isn’t spurious; she used to work for a significant media firm, identified for its vital stance in the direction of the Regulation and Justice Get together (PiS) that was however completely happy to just accept income from companies linked to Orlen, the Polish oil and gasoline firm.
Wasn’t this sort of dependence all the time the case, I hear you ask? Was there ever such a factor as totally impartial journalism?
Actually, in a rustic as polarized as Poland, press freedom won’t ever be simple to attain. If a journalist writes about corruption within the PiS, she is robotically perceived as a supporter of Donald Tusk and the Civic Platform Get together (PO). Likewise, each phrase of criticism in opposition to the PO is seen as proof of collusion with Jarosław Kaczyński’s proper wingers and the PiS. There isn’t a third approach – which is why daring conversations about journalistic freedom recorded on this e-book are greeted with peals of laughter. As a result of it’s political patrons who wield the whip, alongside the promoting sector that usually has ties with state-owned firms or else with enterprise ventures linked to the opposition. Get together political colors are clearly key, till pay charges come into play. The state sector often provides extra money.
The wrestling match
Sociologist Jarosław Flis in a lecture in regards to the state of the Polish media prompt that the nation’s journalism displays the dualism of the political scene. In response to Flis, it’s showy and harking back to American-style wrestling: it could look extra harmful than it truly is, however, very often, a contestant will get killed.
So, what function can journalism play in all this? Ought to it report completely on political struggles? Might it unmask the artificiality of the sport? Or ought to it aspect with a single group, presenting it because the ‘good’ choice whereas relentlessly portray the opposition as an embodiment of wickedness? On the entire, journalists go for the latter. Over the previous 20 years specifically, this selection has created a brand new divide between pro-left and pro-right reporting – or relatively vying for the best and centre-right: the PiS and the PO.
In Flis’ view, ideological variations within the classical sense have been as soon as evident in differing attitudes to the person and the group. The left – or progressively minded teams – believed in communality the place financial points have been involved, and individualism within the subject of social and cultural mores. The correct – conservative thinkers – pinned their religion on the alternative. As we speak, nonetheless, mainstream battles are fought between supporters of higher financial and social freedoms, and their adversaries who help socio-economic communality (in methods typically certain up with the traditions and conventions of Polish rural tradition).
So, in a single nook you get those that are properly educated, comparatively properly off and impartial, whereas within the different you see the much less privileged – people who find themselves not maintaining with new developments and wish financial help from the state.
Tweaking the narrative
Clearly, what we’re seeing right here is class pressure. However how does this have an effect on the state of the media, you would possibly ask. In Poland, the overwhelming majority of media retailers and promoting firms symbolize events linked to the ‘upper echelons’ of the social ladder, the place there’s a marked need for higher freedom and fewer communality in all areas. These events have problem with much less privileged teams and people caught on the backside of the pile, whom they view as pitiably ignorant. They convey a mindset that essentially brings populists to the fore and this, in flip, results in authoritarianism and repression. (Sure, I’m considering of the PiS which likes to use the sense of grievance within the ‘lower strata’ of Polish society and the rising need of the underprivileged to get even).
On this situation, there may be little room for social sensitivity or for understanding the views and issues of individuals with low cultural and financial capital. This features a rising precariat throughout the journalistic career, which usually has simply the primary group of assets talked about right here at its disposal. What’s extra, a nuanced place is troublesome to take care of. It could not be true to say that the story about threats offered by one aspect or the opposite are solely with out basis, however tweaking the narrative is problematic as a result of it tends in the direction of the conclusion that, relying on who has the facility and the strongest voice, both democracy or the nation itself will collapse. In outlining the discourse arising from this considering, Flis makes metaphorical use of a home picture: eggs. Some find yourself hard-boiled, others soft-boiled.
Because the media narrative would have it, nonetheless, the eggs concerned within the social wrestle for dominance are completely both overdone or uncooked – which may be very removed from the case. Some journalists and publicists do detect shades of gray inside this black and white palette, making a media story that has been simplified within the excessive look somewhat extra multifaceted.
And what do the authorities do in response? They put those that complicate issues out with the garbage. They discard them into black baggage, along with ‘all those pesky symmetrists’ and ‘crypto-enthusiasts’ from whichever political camp is in opposition (these persons are typically dubbed the ‘useful idiots’ of each the PiS and the PO), alongside ‘all those’ fundamentalists of the far proper, ‘those’ neo-liberals and ‘those’ leftists. As a social commentator, Professor Flis made varied makes an attempt to nuance the dialogue, however he quickly discovered himself studying out the likes of the next: ‘You say you’re sitting on the barricades however, as a rule, you’re simply pissing on us.’
Politically sick
Paulina Januszewska, creator of ‘Gównodziennikarstwo’ (Bullshit Journalism), 2024. Picture through Instagram
Nonetheless, media staff are not any fools. They know somebody will all the time be treading on their heels – or relatively not ‘someone’ however particular politicians and enterprise folks. And certainly, media organizations should not in need of voices ready to show ugly instances of patronage and dependence. At instances, the way in which they achieve this could appear downright brutal, however some journalists danger their careers doing it. Others merely benefit from the privilege and standing they’ve labored for years to amass.
Dariusz Rosiak is a distinguished journalist and broadcaster. He’s the creator of A Report on the State of the World, broadcast on Polish Radio Three and later, with the help of listeners, on the Patronite web site. Commenting on journalistic independence, he writes that the career has all the time relied on ‘resisting the temptation to succumb to pressure from those who are stronger, more influential and more numerous’ and on not giving method to ‘three kinds of pressure: political, commercial and environmental-cum-emotional’. Let me focus right here on the political.
Magda swapped her full-time publish in public media for a low-grade, garbage job in tabloid journalism. She says that in all points associated to economics and employment rights, in addition to politics, issues look a lot the identical regardless of which aspect you’re employed on. She had imagined that working for a corporation, which varieties a part of the federal government’s propaganda machine, was about as little as it will get. Then the Web portals got here knocking from decrease down.
‘I moved from a big news agency that thought it was running the country, because it supported the government, to a tabloid founded by a guy who worshipped Donald Tusk,’ she tells me. ‘It’s laborious to say which of the 2 was worse. In my outdated job I used to be all however branded a half-wit. Within the new one, I used to be uncovered to ritual mobbing. Now I’m out of labor and really down. I’m advised there’s a disaster in mainstream media and journalists are being sacked en masse, division by division. Can it get any worse, I ask myself? Maybe it might, as a result of I nonetheless hold hoping that I’d discover a approach of constructing a profession within the career. Truthfully, I’m mortified to be telling you this.’ I ask her about journalistic objectivity and he or she faucets her brow in response.
Let’s drop the questions of whether or not a journalist ought to maintain or specific her personal views and who’s partisan and who isn’t – significantly on condition that well-known media personalities invite politicians to their birthday events, or brag on X about sharing bottles of vodka with them. As a substitute, let’s see how political convictions and sympathies can have an effect on the operating of an editorial workplace.
‘I had two Warsaw-based beats to begin with: waste management and the zoo,’ Magda says. ‘A fucking dream job, no less. But how long can you blather on about lions and garbage disposal? In my case it was about 18 months. Generally, I was just boondoggling – but it was still tiring because I wanted to write and there’s not a lot I hate greater than doing nothing or feeling like I’m losing my time and letting myself down intellectually. Then I used to be advised I used to be shirking and didn’t know something, and that my job was to indicate that I used to be toeing the official political line. My boss instructed me to maintain making calls to the Ministry of Infrastructure, and to the transport division, to seek out out in what the President of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, was getting mistaken.’
On one other event she was despatched out to Grochów, a district of Warsaw, to search for ‘green waste’ equivalent to backlogs of uncollected fallen leaves. This time it was the locals who have been baffled when Magda requested them about Trzaskowski’s supposed negligence. As soon as she even left work early to verify what folks in Grochów have been placing of their bins. ‘I know how it must sound, but I was desperate,’ she admits ruefully. ‘I thought I was missing something. I really believed those uncollected leaves must be there.’
It’s getting in the direction of night and we order a few coffees as a result of we hadn’t obtained anyplace close to the tip of Magda’s skilled peregrinations. We cling round within the bar till workers are available to wash the ground. Then we stand speaking outdoors the doorway to the Metro, although the climate was fairly as vile because the propaganda Magda was instructed to drum up. I’m providing these particulars as a result of, in response to one faculty of journalistic writing, a style scene provides high quality and flavour to your textual content. So right here it’s: the espresso was black. OK, so possibly there was a little bit of oat milk with it. Not soya although.
Magda’s recollections of the pandemic are grim. The editorial workplace handled information in regards to the stage of COVID-19 transmission as a conspiracy, and consequently jeopardized the well being and security of its journalists. The deputy editor-in-chief of the state information company, who got here near giving Marta a nervous breakdown, remained a COVID-sceptic for months after the Wuhan virus took maintain. ‘He was anti-vax as well,’ Magda says. ‘He maintained that the pandemic was a fabricated story. It took thousands of news reports for him to twig and see that he was wrong. Meanwhile, during the worst wave of infections, he had an issue with staff working from home. “The editorial office ceases to exist if people are working remotely. There’s merely no level to it,” he used to say – regardless that you possibly can rattle off your dispatches simply as properly within the lavatory. However no, it’s all in regards to the important nature of the work. What bloody important nature? Spreading muck, busting each other’s balls and doing the federal government a favour? There was an workplace in-joke in regards to the PiS politician and adviser Radosław Fogiel: we known as him our ‘Nowogrodzka Street correspondent’ as a result of we had a hotline to the PiS workplace there.
‘When I did an interview with the security experts who exposed the Pegasus spyware affair, my material was trashed,’ Magda provides. ‘It represented an attack on the government and we only ever published paeans about the authorities. That way the till came out looking clean – though sometimes even the PiS office in Nowogrodzka Street shat on our bosses, after which they’d shit on us, and so it went on. Typically, in fact, the bosses would choose up some good, enthusiastic pro-government arse-licker and take him underneath their wing. However, usually, we have been all drowning in bullshit. So I left. And after some time I ended up with a copy-paste web site. Within the first job I used to be letting Trzaskowski have it: within the second, my process was to go for “Kaczor” (Jarosław Kaczyński).’
Magda remembers her early days on the on-line tabloid as a time when she was underneath shut scrutiny and continuously examined by the administration trying out who they have been working with. But the coaching on provide was minimal. Workers of different Web portals verify the identical. They are saying that on-the-job coaching is often confined to instruction on how the portal offers with content material. It doesn’t cowl profession improvement or the advance of journalistic expertise.
‘Why on earth would you need those?’ Marta asks, paradoxically. ‘It was like leaving a toddler alone within the woods with a knife: “Let’s see how he manages. Will he find himself? Will he pick up the vibe?” These guys have been simply overflowing with their very own sense of how cool and superior they have been. The vibe was actually only a mixture of autofellatio and doing the PO a favour. They thought they have been forming an elite to counter these pitiful little pricks from the PiS. They stood each other lunches, they relished their sushi, it was as if they have been nonetheless again in 2002. They’d watch TVN collectively and make feedback like: “God, Kaczynski’s a clown – but isn’t Tusk brilliant!” So, you see, the propaganda was inverted. It was the opposition, the PO politicians who had their very own blogs and have been exposing attitudes that have been outdated and condescending. Makes me really feel sick to recollect it. They imagined themselves as Poland’s saviours, defending us all from the PiS ruling class. It felt a bit like the quilt of Newsweek, with Tusk on a white charger. They’d publish descriptions of Roman Giertych’s achievements as chief of the opposition. They’d share his “fantastic” tweets about defending democracy, regardless that his stuff smacked of crassness, reactionary rural conservatism and smut. However so far as my editors have been involved they have been “strong words”, “clever comebacks” and “spot on”. And so what if Giertych was a cranky, right-wing Catholic fundamentalist? “He had converted, after all.”’
Precarious and dangerous
Igor is a former worker of on-line Polish Radio. He says that the consultants invited to offer interviews on the abortion challenge all got here both from the Catholic College of Lublin (KUL) or that ultra-conservative suppose tank, the Ordo Iuris Institute for Authorized Tradition. A minimum of nobody might complain that they have been ‘religious fundamentalists paid by the Kremlin’.
‘Everyone knew what they would say and what this was all about,’ Igor tells me. ‘The public media has worked out ways of countering any attack on the government. If anybody remarked that the PiS had violated the compromise on abortion, they’d carry out Joanna Lichocka to argue that the left had began the row and that the difficulty was a whole purple herring, regardless that the alternative was true. That is one thing the federal government and the PiS each do. In the course of the 2020-2021 Girls’s Strike, we have been advised to write down that “these women, who are doubtless sponsored by somebody” have been spreading COVID. We exaggerated incidents like graffiti on the partitions of church buildings, which Polish Radio inflated into a significant calamity. I used to go alongside to demonstrations and by no means noticed any aggression from protesters. However then I’d have to return to work and write that I’d witnessed “scenes worthy of Dante”.’
A lady who labored for an Web portal affiliated to a nationwide weekly was tasked with telephoning members of the European parliament linked to the PiS, pretending to be a journalist from the BBC. The intention was merely to verify if the MEPs might converse English.
Paula was instructed to place collectively a chunk about junk contracts. ‘I had to write a suitably outraged article about how people were working their butts off during the pandemic. By the way, did I mention that I had no formal employment contract myself at the time?’ she queries rhetorically.
Igor, talked about above, was additionally employed on a junk contract by Polish Radio and obtained an task to write down about how failures within the administration of contractual formalities have been affecting journalists engaged on the nationwide each day Gazeta Wyborcza.
Daria, who has labored within the media for 30 years, says that whereas she was at TVP Data issues have been very related. ‘They don’t offer you an employment contract. As a substitute, you get “tasks” from folks typically dubbed “racketeers”. These are everlasting staff who interact in small-time enterprise actions. They could be editors or cameramen who take an advance from TVP after which choose up groups of individuals to work for them on junk contracts and pay them a pittance. It’s an association that ensures Polish tv retains its palms clear so it might say that, in contrast to different opposition media, it respects its staff and upholds its values. What values are we speaking about right here, precisely? Discovering loopholes within the legislation? Deceptive the general public?’
Mateusz has labored for among the greatest tabloids in Poland and jokes that, right now, journalism ‘is the most useless profession ever’. When he left the each day Fakt to affix a competing paper, he was provided neither a contract nor insurance coverage. It occurred throughout COVID, so he quaked each time somebody subsequent to him sneezed. Regardless that many of the editorial workforce have been working from house, and the paper stored publishing calls for everybody to respect social distancing, his new employer insisted he got here into the workplace.
‘The buses were almost completely empty, I remember,’ Mateusz says. ‘You could count the passengers on the fingers of one hand, and I’d be all of them nervously, to not say with loathing, in case anybody was carrying the virus. However that wasn’t the worst factor. My employer all the time stored in with just about each political get together on the scene, however particularly with whichever get together was in energy. It appeared to me that, since I used to be within the media, it may be price investigating if the authorities have been maintaining their palms clear – whether or not it was the PiS right now, the PO tomorrow or the Polish Folks’s Get together (PSL) subsequent week. As a result of that’s the way in which it goes on this recreation. However my line supervisor rejected just about every little thing I prompt. Forbidden matters included the strike on the Polish airline LOT, as an illustration, or fraud inside state-owned firms. The truth that representatives of the opposition have been recurrently given an official voice within the paper was irrelevant. I used to be hitting my head in opposition to a brick wall.’
A grubby enterprise
So, what actually is occurring in anti-government media, it’s possible you’ll properly ask? Can’t you belief them both? Economist Łukasz Komuda doesn’t provide a lot in the way in which of fine information. ‘Some journalists remain obsessed with defending the so-called free media in Poland – and rightly if naively so. But despite what idealists and ideologues say, ideas and principles are no more than a bit of gold foil wrapped around a mechanism that monetizes absolutely everything. If you can achieve press freedom by battling with an oppressive state – great! But the content that will suit visual advertising, or campaigns led by media agencies, is bound to be very different.’ All this has eroded checks and balances, in addition to the moral dimension in journalism, Komuda says.
A scarcity of journalistic self-regulation in all areas, not simply political protection, can be highlighted by media specialist Dr Jacek Wasilewski. ‘A fashion journalist is dependent on advertising within the industry. He simply won’t need to write about how local weather change is affecting the style world whereas discussing new developments on the catwalks. The vital method that used to type a part of journalism’s skilled ethos has been outsourced. It’s now the area of political and social activists.’
Nina, a former journalist with feminist aims, illustrates Wasilewski’s remark with one other instance. ‘I used to work with a woman who had an interest in ecology and kept to a firmly anti-capitalist position in everything she did. She put together some excellent critical material about the online shopping platform Shein, and then found out that the advertising department had signed a cooperation agreement with them. Vogue doesn’t even cover the truth that it takes cash from Shein, regardless that the corporate exploits folks and poisons the atmosphere on a large scale. The Vogue journalist who promoted the retailer is well-known and revered within the career however stays completely happy for her byline to seem beside a paean to the Shein model. We might write experiences about Ukraine, however out of the blue we uncover that our media company advertises firms which are financing the Russian army. Once I hear senior editors complain that journalism was as soon as totally different, I’ve to suppress amusing as a result of – in any case – they have been accountable for creating the media we have now right now.’
‘Do you think there’s any form of treatment for all this?’ I ask. ‘I don’t know. I can’t see a approach again,’ Nina replies. The monetary assets merely aren’t there. The money is for the administration and the advertisers. It’s for grubby companies that don’t intrude with the established order and for sponsored articles which are politically comfy – not for real reportage or investigative journalism.’ She escaped a information outlet in favour of a distinct segment cultural portal and doesn’t cover her amusement on the approach issues turned out – regardless that she admits that she’s laughing via tears and that the present arrange fits lots of people. Those that are dedicated to the concepts and rules they maintain are a minority who make conformists really feel uncomfortable, she says.
‘In practice, that’s the way in which it’s all over the place. If firm X places down the cash however has suspect hyperlinks with China, you merely keep away from mentioning it while you interview their consultant or write about their merchandise and technical know-how,’ a journalist with an curiosity in know-how tells me. In politics it’s the identical.
As we speak, the media fall simply into three separate teams, relying on how they’re funded. However you can not ignore the frequent denominator: the systemic exploitation or self-exploitation in varied guises imposed on staff, each ladies and men. The outcomes which are hoped for fluctuate. They embrace the dissemination of presidency propaganda via state media, producing gross sales in industrial media and the implementation of socially vital concepts, in addition to filling gaps created by the state and by personal enterprise of their dealings with NGOs. Consequently, journalism ceases to be a socially helpful exercise. It now not evokes confidence in its audiences, listeners or readers, nor does it critically interact its professionals.
On the one hand, we’re coping with the defence of mass media that are removed from free. On the opposite, we’re lured by temptations to re-Polonize them. The second of those impulses doesn’t goal to revive journalism as a instrument for information dissemination or the implementation of socio-political checks and balances, but it surely does spotlight one very actual challenge: most of Poland’s media retailers are owned by firms which are non-Polish.
Commenting on the economic system as a complete, Jakub Sawulski mentions two issues: ‘the owners of companies that put capital into Poland earn interest from doing so. In other words, some of the profit foreign companies make is reinvested here but part of it flows out of the country, in the form of dividends paid to shareholders for example. Further, there is a danger that, if the present model of economic development is maintained, it will be difficult for Poland to break out of its current role as subcontractor. And, on the whole, the subcontractor earns less than the prime contractor he works for.’
Earnings are efficient disciplinary instruments, actually, however in newsrooms additionally they help a vertical energy construction and will undermine solidarity, particularly present bonds between rank-and-file staff and center administration. If we imagine that journalism actually is the Fourth Property, then clearly Poland’s public media have to be depoliticized and industrial media ought to put higher emphasis on serving the general public. However, for many individuals within the nation, this represents not more than a pipe dream.
This text relies on a fraction from the e-book Bullshit journalism: Why is it so unhealthy to work within the Polish media? published by Eurozine associate journal Krytyka Polityczna in June 2024. The interpretation of this text was commissioned as a part of Come Collectively, a mission leveraging present knowledge from group media group in six totally different international locations to foster modern approaches.
