Page 170 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

MUSICAL CHAIRS? 159

Figure 2 The audiences of the different public spheres

and social reach, but nevertheless were and remain powerful
instruments of opinion- and will-formation.

THE OLD POLITICAL SYSTEM COLLAPSES

An attempt to describe the choices facing Polish broadcasting and mass
communication in general yielded the following forecast:

Polish broadcast media may be said to have fallen behind the
times. To catch up and satisfy predominant social expectations
they would need to democratize, pluralize and decentralize. If any
predictions can be made at all this is likely to happen in one of
two situations: when the authorities become convinced that
abolition of the broadcasting monopoly will not destabilize the
social situation, or when the social costs of maintaining monopoly
begin to outweigh the benefits—whichever comes sooner.
(Jakubowicz and Jędrzejewski, 1988:107)

Like most forecasts, it extrapolated the existing state of affairs into the
future and in particular assumed the permanence of the country’s
political system, including especially the dominant role of ‘the
authorities’, i.e. the country’s power structure, and its ability to control
the situation.
For a while, the forecast could be seen to be coming true. In 1988–9,
the top political authorities sought to find a way to resolve Poland’s
internal conflict and dissent, and to head off the challenge to their own
position which later came anyway. To this end, they embarked on a
programme of reform designed expressly to encourage the emergence
of a civil society and a socialist parliamentary democracy in the country.
Obviously, this had to involve a redefinition of the public sphere and a
change of communication policy. This went in two directions: