Page 57 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Comparing Media Systems

Because this issue helps to clarify the distinctions involved in both
of these dimensions, it is worth elaborating a bit further here. We will
consider two examples drawn from outside the region that is the primary
focus of this book.
One of the more interesting discussions of the nature of journal-
istic professionalism is Curry’s (1990) analysis of journalists in com-
munist Poland – interesting in part because the structural conditions
of the media in Poland were not those we usually associate with the
professionalization. Curry argues that despite an official ideology that
conceived the media as instruments of the party, Polish journalists de-
veloped a strong professional culture. This was in some sense, of course,
a failed professionalism: external conditions – the prevalence of censor-
ship, state ownership of the media and political repression – meant that
journalists were routinely thwarted in attempting to act according to a
professional conception of their role. Nevertheless they did clearly have
such a conception: they had a strong sense of distinct identity and of
a distinct role in society, and resisted intrusions of outsiders into jour-
nalistic work, including the “worker and peasant correspondents” of the
early Stalinist years, high-level political figures who wrote political com-
mentary but were refused membership in the journalists’ union, and
Solidarity officials who wanted control when dissident papers emerged.
They placed a high value on autonomy, had a strong sense of professional
solidarity that persisted even in periods of sharp political conflict, and
a hierarchy of prestige based on peer judgments that cut across political
differences.
At the same time, Polish journalists clearly saw journalism as a
“political profession,” as Max Weber once put it. They conceived it as
part of their role to shape policy and solve social problems. They con-
sidered the mere reporting of facts not to be real professional work, and
practiced a style of writing that placed heavy emphasis on commentary.
This conception of journalism seems to have carried over to the inde-
pendent media of the post-Communist period. Adam Michnik, editor
of the Gazeta Wyborcza – originally a paper connected to the Solidarity
trade union and now Poland’s major daily – while emphasizing that his
paper sought to avoid narrow partisanship and to provide a high degree
of internal pluralism, wrote in 1995, “I always wanted Gazeta to have a
clearly defined line. It resulted from the identity of the Solidarity demo-
cratic opposition and workers’ social ethics ... (76).” And he quoted the
legendary Polish journalist Ksawery Pruszynski as saying “The task of
the journalist ... is to voice what he has arrived at in his reasoning (78).”

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