About a dozen European Union journalists have been wined and dined in Poland in last week, by the foreign ministry, which wanted to know what we thought of Poland. There is a disparity between what Europe thinks of Poland and Poland thinks of Europe. In the EU consultants Anholt’s global nation brands index of 35 countries, polling thousands, the country is near the bottom, 30th place. On the other hand, Poland gives the European Union its top position. Almost no one else in the whole world, apart from the Czech Republic and Argentina, likes Europe as much as Poland does.
Why is Poland so poorly perceived? Perhaps partly because of distorted or ignorant reporting, or absent reporting. My fellow journalists on a trip this week were not overly knowledgeable about Poland, which must irritate the proud elite of this country no end. Our first session started: “We let you ask the questions, since we find there are some basic misconceptions about Poland.” My friends made progress, learning to say please and thank you in Polish by the end of the week.
It is frustrating but not much can be done in the short term; and it is instructive to realise that perception of a country probably depends as much on the underlying reality – reality at least seen by insiders with integrity - and it is this we must now examine.
One pan European value is arguably free speech.
Last February the rallying cry was “we are all Danes now”; Europeans set aside their differences over common agricultural policy, the constitution and the various day-to-day events of Brussels and newspapers across the continent republished the offensive Mohammed cartoons that got Jyllands-posten in trouble with Arab opinion worldwide.
It is a safe bet that a European country that has a poor track record on freedom of speech is going to be worse regarded by its fellow Europeans than a country with a better record. Poland under even the Kaczynski brothers at least seems to be aware of the propaganda value of freedom of speech, since on the last day we were taken to a government-funded Belarusian language radio station, Radio Racija, “Radio rationality”, which sends dozens of hours of programming on various wavelengths, Belarusian music and politics, into that authoritarian country, a traditional sphere of interest for Poland, a country where president Aleksander Lukashenko has ruled since 1994 and won elections in March this year with eighty percent of the vote, a distinctly dodgy result.
I am sure Belarus deserves its near bottom ranking on the Reporters sans Frontieres list, though I was surprised that the brave reporters – who look like the men who ran the freedom movement show in Poland and Hungary in the eighties, bearded, cardiganed, idealistic – were not actually jailed for their reports; they travel freely in and out of Belarus; there is minor psychological hassle from the police, but their worst difficulties seem to be failure to receive accreditation and prohibition to talk to Belarusian government officials. What is instructive to make is a comparison between Belarus – widely held to undemocratic – and Poland itself, a member of the EU which has signed up to an acquis that includes guarantees of freedom of speech.
Poland bottom
What were not told on the tour, and I am not surprised, is that Poland itself is the bottom-ranking EU country for freedom of speech (58th place, far below neighbours Czech Republic and Hungary). The editor of one satirical magazine was fined for criticising the Pope; the editor of another magazine had to cut an offending article out of 80,000 copies before could get put on the streets for an article calling the Kaczynski brothers liars; and the state authority in charge of monitoring broadcasting, KRRIT, fined a private Polish TV station Polsat 125,000 euros after a guest on a Polsat talk show made fun and mimicked the voice of the presenter of the Radio Maryja group, which has acted virtually as a mouthpiece for the Kaczynskis among the catholic, rural, uneducated poor that form their base. This same state council has never once criticised Radio Maryja for its frequent anti-Semitic remarks.
What this means for what isn’t said in Poland as a result of these “signals” is anyone’s guess: there could be a great deal of self censorship that prevents people from crossing the line into persecution. There is a ban on photographing the Kaczynskis in profile. (see photo).
But it is instructive to see how the Kaczynskis treat the less fettered foreign press as an indication regards their attitude to domestic media: famously the German liberal paper Die Tageszeitung said the twins resembled potatoes in July and that their experience of abroad was “limited to the spittoons at Frankfurt airport”.
This prompted prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski to call on the German government to apologise for the paper’s remarks, much in the manner ironically the worldwide Muslim councils showed their failure to understand separation between government and media by asking the Danish prime minister to apologise for the cartoons back in February. Warsaw regional prosecutors launched an investigation into whether the paper broke article 135 of a Polish law that imposes a sentence of up to three years for journalists who insult a Polish head of state. A favoured catholic newspaper, Nasz Dziennik, meanwhile listed 16 German correspondents in Poland and told people to remember their names. Tageszeitung’s Warsaw correspondent was banned from speaking to Polish officials, RSF reported.
Before I went out to Poland, I was intrigued by reports that Jaroslaw – who lives with his mother – is gay, since his brother, Lech, the president, has earned the ire of the European commission by banning gay pride marches in Warsaw and he himself has argued for banning gay teachers in schools. There have been allusions to it. Apparently Lech Walesa said on a recent TV programme, Teraz My, that at his birthday party a decade earlier, “Lech Kaczynski brought has wife and Jaroslaw brought his husband.”
I asked the foreign editor of Gazeta Wyborcza if this was true, and he shrugged, and his colleague dissembled. I took the answer as a no. Such caution does not surprise since, according to Gay City News, a US publication that quotes extensively from insider Polish homosexual journalist sources, one TV journalist, Mikolaj Kunica, who refused to edit out an interview remark by an old Kaczynski friend that indicated his possible gayness was fired by the head of Polish television.
It is probably a good idea if Poland does what it takes to move up the press freedom rankings as it prepares to promote itself as a good EU member. The essence of salesmanship is that you have to have a good product – and even then it might not work. This great country deserves all the success.
