Page 175 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

164 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

sources of information. And indeed, clandestine publishing houses, for
example, are suffering now that official ones publish previously banned
books (cf. ‘Skreślanie z indeksu’, 1989). However, much more is at
stake here. The official Polish media clearly seek to copy the methods
used by western media in imposing hegemony, whereby the ‘definitions
of reality’ favourable to the power structure come to constitute the
primary ‘lived reality’ for the the majority of society, in part because the
power structure

strive[s] and to a degree succeed[s] in framing all the competing
definitions of reality within [its] range, bringing all the
alternatives within [its] horizon of thought.
(Hall 1983:333)

This signifies a major change of strategy, from one of mind-
management and full cognitive control to one of limited cognitive
control. As we have said, previously the power structure sought to
prevent the emergence of any genuine public sphere, or at least to
preclude the position of the official media from being challenged. Now,
bowing to the inevitable, it was prepared to give its own media much
more latitude and let them move away from the subordination pole of the
continuum, and recognize the existence of the other public spheres (with
their own ‘definitions of reality’) wholly autonomous in relation to
itself. It did, however, hope to be able successfully to pursue its new
strategy, based on the ‘all important insight that to be effective,
hegemony in the public sphere need not be absolute, merely dominant’
(Dahlgren 1989:31). After all, despite access to many media outlets,
most people still used the official media, and especially television, as
their main source of news.

NEW INFORMATION ORDER

Defining the new order
‘Observance of the constitutional principles of freedom of speech and
publication’ featured prominently on the list of demands addressed to the
government by shipyard workers in Gdansk in August 1980 during the
strike which gave the first impetus for the birth of Solidarity. The
agreement subsequently signed with the government called for the
introduction of a new, liberalized law on censorship (which went into