Page 165 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

154 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

The foregoing suggests one perspective of looking at the situation in
the Polish public sphere and system of mass communication. Another,
equally fruitful perspective can be derived from the debate on the
relationship between the media and society in the process of social
change. Rosengren (1981) distinguishes four types of possible
relationships, depending on one’s view of whether it is the media that
influence society (i.e. are the first mover and mould change), or vice
versa (media mirror change), or whether the influence is mutual, or
there is no influence either way. With regard in particular to the
political process Peterson, Jensen and Rivers (1966:120) point out that
the media usually serve to strengthen the status quo (i.e. mirror the
social order), but can also be used to oppose (i.e. mould) it; which of the
two tendencies is stronger depends on the degree of stability or
instability in society. This would suggest that while out of Rosengren’s
four possibilities that of ‘interdependence’ captures the essence of the
relationship best, it should be modified by recognition of the non-
equivalence of the media and society in that relationship, with
macrostructural social factors influencing the media’s role. The
following discussion should shed some light on this question.
And finally, it should contribute to an understanding of the linkages
between the mass media and politics. Gurevitch and Blumler (1983)
point out that the central issue in the relationship between media and
political institutions revolves around the media’s relative degree of
autonomy and to what extent and by what means it is allowed to be
constrained, fixing their position on the subordination-autonomy
continuum and crucially affecting their role in society. This seems to
reinforce the thesis of the non-equivalence of the media vis-à-vis the
macrostructural social determinants. As we will see, this issue is central
to any discussion of the Polish mass media.

SUBVERTING THE APPARATUS OF
COGNITIVE CONTROL

The Stalinist model of social organization made no provision for the
existence of a civil society or of a public sphere, especially one defined
as a ‘space for rational and universalistic politics distinct from both the
economy and the state’ (Garnham 1986:30), or as a situation in which
‘all voices [would] hav[e] equal access to a neutral public sphere, where
their unfettered rational discourse would culminate in the articulation of
popular will’ (Dahlgren 1987:25). The power structure sought to
subsume and assimilate the totality of culture, i.e. by fixing the media’s