Page 166 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

MUSICAL CHAIRS? 155

position firmly on the subordination pole of the continuum. They were
quite literally supposed to serve as State Ideological Apparatuses. More
specifically—as a means of attempting to maintain what might be called
cognitive control. As Adam Michnik, a leading opposition thinker, has
put it,

The communists who arrived [in Poland] at the end of the war
succeeded in imposing false solutions because they succeeded in
imposing their language…most of our society lost its language.
(Michnik 1981:67; emphasis added)
In the sphere of social communication this resulted in a situation in
which

the rules of the political game, the grammar of political language
are so constructed that they automatically reproduce and
perpetuate th[e] party’s domination… [it is a] language which ha
[s] no grammatical rules for concept-formation separate from the
activity of the communist party.
(Bauman 1981:51)

In general terms, the institutions of the public sphere were to serve the
purpose of introducing into social circulation only information, views
and ideas functional in terms of the goals pursued by the power
structure (with others to be suppressed by other, non-ideological and
non-media means). This endeavour was successful in the early fifties,
but has been a failure ever since.
‘All political systems generate principles derived from the tenets of
their political cultures, for regulating the political role of the mass
media’ (Gurevitch and Blumler 1983:282; cf. also Smith 1979,
McQuail and Siune 1986). Application of these principles depends on a
number of factors:
– on how great the need is for the media to perform a normative and
integrating role in society (Alexander 1981);
– on the public definitions of the media (McQuail 1987) and
functions assigned to them, including especially on whether their
content bears directly on questions related to the social order;
– and on the social reach and impact of the particular media: the
greater they are, the more rigorous regulation is likely to be.
In Poland, as elsewhere, this general rule has been applied in a
selective fashion. Broadcasting has been regulated more strictly than the