WHO IS GOVERNING HERE…
LIDIA DUDKIEWICZ, THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF ‘NIEDZIELA’
Re-polonization of media is doing well now. It is high time we were fighting for having Polish, not foreign, German mass media, both the radio and newspapers. Regional newspapers read in Poland, in 90 percent, are in the hands of the foreign capital, mainly the German one – and this is a scandal. So, the totalitarian informative violence can be used, which creates consciousness unfamiliar to the Polish raison d’etate. Not long time ago was there party and commercial commotion in Polish media. Finally, it began to change when the new authority appeared and the nation is regaining media, at least the public ones.
Recently, the prime minister Beata Szydło has shared her experiences from a few months ago, when in Poland the first media act was introduced. At that time she was paying a visit to France and she was a witness what it was alarmed that in Poland assassination on the freedom of speech was being prepared. The president of France Francois Hollande, concerned then, had an occasion to ask the prime minister Szydło what was happening with media in Poland. and she could answer him calmly that in the country at the Vistula, exactly the same solutions as in France were being implemented. Let’s remind that foreign publications which were trying to enter the market of magazines’ opinion in France, were stopped. It was similar in the case of Germany. In 2005 there were loud discussions about an attempt of taking over the newspaper ‘Berliner Zeitung’ by the foreign capital, but it failed quickly. The Germans did not let foreigners take over their newspaper.
Media are too important area of influence on citizens in order to let in foreigners there, and give them a range of souls. In Poland we are aware of it right now when our market of media has been taken over by the foreign capital. Most shares in the Polish market are in the hands of: the Bauer Publishing House, Ringier Axel Springer Media, Polish Press Group, which is included in the German consortium Verlagsgruppe Passau, and also Agora. The mentioned consortiums sell a dozen, and even over a hundred million copies of various newspapers in Polish. In comparison to it, Polish newspapers have trace circulation.
The current development of digital networks is favourable to a new ‘agora’ – an open arena of a public debate. Internet is becoming an important space of human functioning. Beside home, work, school or church – Network is an important meeting place at present. Social portals are a new window to the world and an opportunity to contact with other people, but it is also a serious danger. In our eyes there is a quick development of electronic media, which are somehow a new continent. ‘However, the human being has never been so enslaved with violence, pumped up with streams of information as today’ – Witold Gadowski writes in the current ‘Sunday’. He says that ‘since the ordinary mobile became a media Combine- harvester, the authority has been in the hands of those who are sitting at informative straits through which seas of information, pseudo-information, lies and re-programmed messages have been flowing’. Gadowski warns that ‘the most severe war is coming’. This is a fight for our sub-consciousness and consciousness. It is taking place mainly in social media with using anonymous administrators who are reigning the field of media influence on web users. It is worth reflecting on it in relation to the Sunday of Mass Media which is attributable onto 17 September 2017.
AA
„Niedziela” 38/2017