The results of the report prepared by the Association of Polish Journalists (SDP) reveal the exclusion of journalists with conservative, right-wing views from the public debate in the countries of the Three Seas Initiative, and show that post-communism is altogether present in the media in those countries.
Jolanta Hajdasz
New media and old problems. Freedom of speech in the Three Seas countries
The "Report on Media Freedom in the countries of the Three Seas Initiative" prepared by the Association of Polish Journalists has been published. The results of the report are surprising – they reveal the exclusion of journalists with conservative, right-wing views from the public debate, and show that post-communism is altogether present in the media in those countries.
We do not have media that speak with the voice of our nation (Croatia). Our media are pro-western, so they identify themselves with LGBT values and copy-and-paste concepts out of the liberal machinery of the West (Romania). Once again we have newspeak, which is a tool of power, and words such as homophobia, Islamophobia, and hate speech are its examples (Slovenia).
It is not possible to talk about the Christian origins of Europe in the media (Croatia) – these sentences surprised me the most when reading hundreds of statements contained in questionnaires, transcripts from conferences and studies collected while working on the Report on Media Freedom in the countries of the Three Seas Initiative, which was prepared by SDP’s Press Freedom Monitoring Centre, as part of the "Journalists’ Debate II" project. To give an overview of several months of work of the entire team on the Report, I would like to present some of my reflections.
Far from mainstream
I should start with a disclaimer. Our Report is not a comprehensive scientific study because in a relatively short period of time it was impossible to elaborate such a complex issue in an exhaustive manner, and confirm it by a search query, performed in national archives, for instance. Its value, however, is undeniable. This is because this was the first such opportunity to collect transitory and often unnoticed opinions and experiences of journalists in the form of source material; ones not representing only the so-called mainstream media, i.e. those with the largest audience (the highest sales in the printed press sector, the highest radio audience, the highest audience among television broadcasters, or the highest clickthrough rate on the Internet) in a particular country.
All the countries of the Three Seas Initiative (except Austria) have experienced the communist regime, which to this day significantly determines all stages of the transmission of each message "from sender to recipient" – from deciding which of the daily events will be publicised by the media, what kind of message that will be, which of the featured individuals will be positive and which negative, and what types of emotions should be evoked in the audience by the whole event. Contrary to appearances, the unconstrained journalistic statements and opinions collected in the Report are, in my opinion, of great significance.
They show the community of people which are systematically excluded from the public debate, as it cannot be considered accidental that the same topics and the same problems which are insoluble at the national level, are repeated in the conversations and statements of these journalists. We should not underestimate these opinions, because there are many indications that it is precisely those journalists who have been ignored by the main media who are close to their compatriots, who are aware their problems and... who lack media outlets to present them.
This is despite the multitude of such media outlets – hundreds of press titles, websites and great fortunes amassed by their owners. The opinions quoted in the introduction: we do not have media that speak with the voice of our nation (Croatia); our media are pro-western, so they identify themselves with LGBT values and copy-and-paste concepts out of the liberal machinery of the West (Romania); once again we have newspeak, which is a tool of power, and words such as homophobia, Islamophobia, and hate speech are its examples (Slovenia); it is not possible to talk about the Christian origins of Europe in the media (Croatia) – should sound like an alarm bell, signalling that there is still a long way to go before the freedom of the media and freedom of speech are achieved in these countries.
In circumstances in which the fate and, above all, the employment of the journalists pronouncing these statements is uncertain, it is difficult to publish hard evidence to support these opinions, but their credibility in this study is evidenced by experienced journalists from Poland, who have a rich and documented professional experience. Their accounts should be taken very seriously because rarely does this voice have the opportunity to find its way into the public space, and especially beyond the Polish borders. The number of employed journalists and foreign correspondents, the length of the functioning of the media representatives in the press market, the size of capital and the appropriate positioning in search engines make the mainstream media the only source of information about problems experienced by the media in a particular country. Allowing their opponents to speak is not on the agenda of these largest media outlets.
For comparison, it is as if the Polish media market and system were to be described only on the basis of information provided by "Gazeta Wyborcza", which is strictly profiled in terms of its worldview and, therefore, clearly assesses the phenomena of public life in a manner consistent with its own system of values, the existence of which the news recipient, especially a foreign one, may not be aware of at all. That is why the Association of Polish Journalists has decided to prepare the Report on Media Freedom in the countries of the Three Seas Initiative. To do this, we have made direct contact with journalists, employees and media collaborators, in order to reach out to interlocutors outside the mainstream media and the most popular search engines.
Who, what, when and how?
The Three Seas is an international economic and political initiative which brings together twelve European countries lying between the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and the Adriatic Sea: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary. All these countries, except Austria, share the experience of functioning under the communist regime, so we have decided to exclude Austria from this study as the only country whose society, and thus also the means of mass communication, have not experienced communism and post-communism.
We have established contact with journalists from eleven countries, and made eleven trips to meet them directly. The final Report was prepared based on questionnaires supplied to journalists who took part in meetings and panel discussions in the countries participating in the project, as well as reports of the so-called coordinators, i.e. people from Poland responsible for preparing the study in each country.
These well-known and experienced journalists included Grzegorz Górny, Wiktor Świetlik, Wojciech Mucha, Jadwiga Chmielowska, Wojciech Pokora, Iwona Sznajderska, Piotr Hlebowicz, Andrzej Klimczak and Monika Pietraszkiewicz. A total of eleven study tours to Budapest, Bucharest, Vienna, Riga, Tallinn, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Prague, Bratislava, Sofia and Vilnius took place between November 2018 and March 2019. Coordinators and SDP members participating in meetings with local journalists collected a total of 43 questionnaires from professionally active journalists, and prepared eleven reports on the freedom of the media in individual countries. The study also analysed almost eleven hours of audio-visual recording from the International Conference "I Love and Understand Freedom (of Speech)", which took place between 28 February and 1 March 2019 in Warsaw at Dom Dziennikarza – the headquarters of the Association of Polish Journalists. These materials were subject to qualitative and quantitative analyses, but it should be noted that the quantitative analysis was not conducted on a representative sample, so the results are only supplementary to the qualitative analysis. It is worth noting, however, that journalists in any country are a very specific and – despite appearances of openness – hermetic professional group, also not too numerous; the opportunity to determine its views and opinions expressed in an unconstrained atmosphere of a professional meeting of fellow journalists is therefore very valuable.
We have also tried to reach journalists from niche media outlets presenting conservative values and right-wing views. All respondents are professionally active journalists working for all types of mass communication entities, with the vast majority – 24 journalists – working in their profession for more than 10 years. Out of 43 people who have completed the survey, 13 are journalists with 10-20 years of experience of working for the media industry, and 11 respondents have worked in their profession for more than 20 years. This means that the majority of respondents have worked as journalists long enough to perceive many aspects of this profession from the perspective of a practitioner, a long-time professional. Only 14 journalists have worked in the profession for less than ten years. The remaining respondents – 5 people – have not provided information on the length of their professional experience. The oldest respondent comes from Hungary and has been working as a journalist since 1978, while the youngest journalist comes from Slovakia and has the experience of approximately one year. More than half of the survey participants reported that they had changed their jobs at least two or three times, often losing it against their will. "I’ve worked in my profession since 1991, I’ve gone from being a journalist to editor-in-chief and back again" – this is how one of the respondents described his professional life. The survey was anonymous, but each meeting participant who has completed the questionnaire had to describe their own professional experience.
What are the conclusions?
Our study clearly shows that despite their geographical proximity, the journalists from the countries of the Three Seas Initiative have little (or no) knowledge on the methods of implementing the freedom of speech principle in countries other than their own, as there are no systematic studies on this particular subject.
It was also confirmed that it has become settled practice in the Three Seas Initiative countries, even in neighbouring states, to obtain knowledge about the freedom of the media from the reports prepared by international organisations such as Freedom House or Reporters Without Borders, whose findings, for instance, on the state of the freedom of the media in Poland, in the opinion of SDP are inconsistent with the actual state of affairs, and are based on unclear criteria and subjective assessments of those preparing the studies for these organisations.
For example, Freedom House reports that the media in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia are only partly free, while Reporters Without Borders once again lowered Poland’s ratings in 2018 – in the freedom of speech ranking for 2018, Poland was only 58th out of 180 countries, and a year later, in 2019, it was classified as 59th, which means a drop of 41 places compared to 2015. In fact, there is no rational reason to justify such a drastic fall. The situation in other countries is even worse – the ranking prepared by Reporters Without Borders for 2018 gave Hungary 73rd, Croatia 69th and Bulgaria 111th place. If the description of the situation in these countries is as "reliable" as in the case of Poland, then there are certainly causes for concern. It means that we do not know much about each other, and therefore we will find it more difficult to cooperate and counter threats.
The conclusions drawn from the Report are as follows:
- In all the states of the Three Seas Initiative, the transformation of the means of mass communication had a different course and led to the emergence of different press systems, despite their appearance of similarity. Journalist associations, editorial offices and media institutions have no counterparts in individual countries, and even seemingly similar organisations differ in their origin and the values they represent. Not knowing who de facto represents whose interests is quite common.
- There is a lack of up-to-date, reliable economic analyses concerning the broadly understood media industry. Even experienced journalists, who have been connected with professional media outlets for many years, do not know who finances their workplaces and their employment and how. There is very little knowledge about the mechanisms of creating even the most well-known media entities in individual countries of the Three Seas Initiative and the reasons for the collapse of others. Also, no one knows where such information can be found. Practically no one knows who the owners of the media entities are, even those journalists who can specify (albeit rarely) the country of origin of the owners of the media outlet they work for. It is very rare for them to be able to quote the names of specific companies, corporations, partnerships or even the family name of the owners.
- There is also the issue of the language barrier. Despite prevalent declarations of speaking the English language, in practice this means the communicative knowledge of the language. Whenever it was possible to use an interpreter from the local language in the conversations, the quantity of information provided by the journalists increased to a considerable degree. These journalists possess a great deal of knowledge about the current situation in their countries and the contemporary media, and they share this information despite the real risk of losing their jobs or income in situations where they are recognised as representing "inappropriate" or "politically incorrect" views.
- It would be advisable to develop a methodology for creating a report on the implementation of the freedom of speech principle for the countries forming the Three Seas Initiative. Such a report would be created according to uniform criteria for all the countries, for instance, by using the example of the report prepared by Reporters Without Borders, but with its own methods of analysis, independent of the existing journalist organisations and, above all, based on independent sources of information. The reports prepared by Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders are subordinate to ideological theses, and this statement is confirmed by journalists originating from many countries (although not all of them). I would also like to point out that this does not equal the rejection of the report prepared by Reporters Without Borders or that this organisation deliberately distorts the image of the freedom of the media when assessing the situation in the countries of our region, but there are numerous indications that over the last 30 years this organisation has introduced permanent mechanisms for obtaining information from a particular country, and it does not take into account alternative sources of information to the mainstream media. As any protests against the unjustified lowering of positions in the rankings on the subject of the freedom of speech (for instance, those originating from Poland or Hungary) are completely ineffective, there is a need to create an alternative tool to describe the situation in the media.
- No country was identified as having technical problems with access to the infrastructure. Post-communist countries, such as the states belonging to the Three Seas Initiative, have certainly managed to catch up with the West in this sector of the media industry, which was loudly and universally postulated in the 1990s and also in later years. In general, there are no problems with access to printed newspapers, broadband Internet, or digital terrestrial television. However, we should remember that the media are not limited to modern technology, but also, and above all, the content of the message disseminated. The battle for its quality and authenticity should be resumed.
In my opinion, all the issues discussed above require the implementation of in-depth interdisciplinary empirical research in the future. We would also need to adopt a historical approach, because only by analysing the facts of the past can we obtain the true picture of the contemporary media. I hope that SDP will continue to focus on this issue and that in a year’s time, it decides to publish report no. 2 on the freedom of speech in the countries of the Three Seas Initiative. I trust that the second report would be more optimistic.
The "Report on Media Freedom in the countries of the Three Seas Initiative" is available in its entirety together with attachments on cmwp.sdp.pl in the "Download" tab.
Dr Jolanta Hajdasz is a professor at the Poznan University of Social Sciences, and the Director of CMWP SDP.
Jolanta Hajdasz’s article entitled "Nowe media, stare problemy. Wolność słowa w krajach Trójmorza" ("New media and old problems. Freedom of speech in the Three Seas countries") can be found on pp. 4-5 of the June edition of "Wielkopolski Kurier WNET" no. 60/2019, gumroad.com.