Page 172 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

MUSICAL CHAIRS? 161

and other forces on the one hand, and the opposition on the other, in the
spring of 1989. There, the government’s monopoly of broadcasting and
the party’s near-monopoly control over the press came under heavy
attack from all sides, including also parts of the political establishment.
The conference decided that the Press Law would be amended so that
anyone, including a private individual, could start a newspaper without
the need for a special licence. Accordingly, Solidarity is able to publish
a growing number of its newspapers legally. Underground publishers
and periodicals were invited to come in from the cold and operate
legally. Censorship has been liberalized to a considerable extent. 2
Newsprint allocation will end in 1990, and newsprint will be available
on the open market.
Even before the conference, the law had been changed so as to make
possible the emergence of a licensed and supervised private and/or
commercial sector in such areas as book publishing, film production and
distribution, etc., and legal and technical conditions are being created
for the inflow of new media content into the country (this concerns
mainly video and satellite television).
So, in line with the principle formulated above, it is media with
relatively limited social reach, including newspapers and periodicals (as
well as satellite television, available, for financial reasons, only to very
few viewers) which have been liberalized. The broadcast media are a
different story, however. At the conference, the official side insisted on
retaining both monopoly and unchanged institutional structures, while
3
allowing a degree of access to airtime. It saw broadcasting as the ‘main
lever’ of building social consciousness and so was determined
‘resolutely to defend [its] political cohesiveness’ (Urban 1989).
Polish sociologist, Stanislaw Ossowski (1967) has distinguished three
general types of social order:
– order of ‘collective ideas’, where social life is based on social
customs and regulated by traditional behaviour patterns;
– polycentric order, where social life is based on interaction and is a
result of non-coordinated actions by various decision-making centres,
certain rules being common to all;
– monocentric order, where social life is regulated by centralized
decision-making, with an institution supervising the observance of such
decisions.
The new communication policy outlined above was clearly designed
to counter what the authorities perceived as a threat that Poland’s social
system would become so polycentric (i.e. will represent what Karpiński
(1985) calls ‘atomized polycentrism’) as to become unmanageable and