Axess 2004, Translated by Phil Holmes
The fact that something is true does not mean that it necessarily has to go into the paper. According to Adam Michnik, a journalist must also be a businessman and a politician. In Poland he is sometimes rather unkindly called “the Vice President”, as he exercises such great influence from his post as editor of Gazeta Wyborcza.
The world’s most improbable newspaper is called Fakt. Its front page is pink, bilious green and mauve. It headlines entice the reader with “shock”, “shame”, “abnormal” or just simply “incredible”. On the inside pages you can read about the UFO over Warsaw, about a female singer’s tummy troubles or about a man who was almost shredded by a power saw. Here and there normal news is to be found, but it is often slanted toward the grotesque, and is rarely longer than the paragraph that ends here. Poland, it appears, is the world’s best nation, which arouses understandable envy among others, who for this reason wish Poles ill.
So far so good. The newspaper Fakt is Axel Springer’s attempt to launch a Polish variant of Bild-Zeitung. With its price slashed to half of what its competitors cost, it has, since last autumn, achieved a circulation of over half a million. Its readers are fed on a diet of rapes, murders, remarkable recoveries from illness, women’s thighs, evil fathers and angelic mothers (or vice versa), and ongoing campaigns of persecution against some celebrity from the entertainment business, all of this sung in a breathless treble. Fakt also has a political message: all of Poland’s problems could have been solved were it not for the fact that their country’s politicians tell lies and get rich at the expense of the little man who reads Fakt.
This is what it is like from Thursday to Tuesday. On Wednesday comes the shock: in a 16-page supplement (“Europe”) André Glucksmann writes about Greek philosophy, Imre Kertész talks about his writing, Zygmunt Bauman analyses globalisation. Or else Allen Ginsberg writes a poem about Fernando Pessoa while Mario Vargas Llosa dissects the European identity. Few articles are shorter than this one, although possibly somewhat more compact. Otherwise: Antony Beevor, Emmanuel Todd, Joseph E. Stieglitz, Peter Sloterdijk, a poem by Sylvia Plath …
For five days each week the world is a soap opera, a heartbreaking struggle between good and evil, as if in a novel by Alexandre Dumas. On the sixth day (Fakt is not published on Sundays) the Frankfurt School is what counts. At the sight of this strange mutation you may begin to doubt your senses, like the man who was heard conjuring up a giraffe: “Animals like that don’t exist!”
The most successful newspaper man in central Europe is called Adam Michnik. For 15 years his Gazeta Wyborcza has dominated Poland’s public arenas. For him Fakt is “an incredibly brutal attack on the climate of debate and on civilised customs”. True, that is what Fakt is like five days a week. And what does he say about the sixth day?
“Surrealism. This supplement is so elitist it would barely find 600 buyers in the whole country. But it is published in 200,000 copies.”
So what is the point? An alibi for the Polish intelligentsia, who would really like to take a peek at the purple pages, but are ashamed to?
“Oh no, our intelligentsia has no shame! I think it’s a coldly calculated marketing decision.” Replies Michnik, looking a little proud, as he says that when Springer begins to sell bare breasts with the help of Imre Kertész, then in a way he, Adam Michnik, can take the credit.
“Usually it is the tabloids that drag down the quality papers towards their own level. In Poland we can see a movement in the opposite direction. For 15 years Gazeta Wyborcza has held a special position as the biggest selling newspaper, setting the tone. With perverse obstinacy we have published long, informed texts by Havel, Kolakowski, Derrida, Sontag, Habermas … I wanted Gazeta to be a school for thought, avoiding stereotypes and ideological templates.
In a country like Poland, where advanced periodicals are marginalised, a pharmacist in Szczebrzeszyn will have no contact with the European debate if he doesn’t get it in his daily paper. If you printed these essays in a journal, it would perhaps sell 50,000 copies. Now they reach a couple of million. And look – all the other papers have followed suit, and acquired more or less successful intellectual supplements. We have set the standard, and now all the editors believe that they have to have profound thoughts in the paper if they want to be taken seriously.
It is true, Gazeta Wyborcza defies most of the recipes for how a modern daily paper should be presented. At one end it is brief and instrumental, a kind of expanded Metro. In the middle it is like a Swedish morning paper, but towards the back it becomes a mixture of New York Review of Books, Ésprit, Granta and Historisk Tidskrift. All the keys to the social debate (a Robert Kagan, Ulrich Beck, Joschka Fischer or Susan Sontag) which in countries like Sweden or France are reserved for an intellectual elite, can be absorbed by the Polish and massive reader together with the sports news for SEK 4.80 a day. “We don’t make a paper for all, we try to make a paper for Everyman.”
How did he arrive at this recipe?
“Recipe? Gazeta is as it is … because I am who I am! As editor, I do the same thing I used to do as a dissident, a prisoner, an activist in KOR in Solidarity … listen, to make a good daily paper you have to be something of a … prophet. A Jeremiah who feels his calling and knows that, one day, he’ll have to say no to the Pharaoh and pay the price. But, if you’re just a prophet, you’ll end your days mumbling to yourself in an ivory tower. A good editor, therefore, has to have two souls, that of the prophet and that of the businessman who knows how to survive in the market. But, if you’re just a businessman, you will end in pure cynicism, like Axel Springer.
So far the recipe has been successful. Gazeta Wyborcza’s 15 years history is actually a pure Cinderella story. I happened to be around when this, “the first independent daily paper between the Elbe and the Pacific Ocean”, took its first steps in the spring of 1989 (Dagens Nyheter, 3 June1989). A handful of enthusiasts, most of them with considerable experience of samizdat publishing, sat in a nursery school (you had to go down on your knees to wash your hands, as the washbasins were designed for four year olds), preparing eight pages a day during the first democratic elections behind the Iron Curtain. There were not many regular journalists in Gazeta’s first newsroom, the core of whom today manage a media empire. Most of them were essayists, psychologists, technicians …
Helena Luczywo, together with Adam Michnik, the paper’s journalistic genius, is a trained economist and anglicist, but her main claim to fame is that, between 1981 and 1989, she was hunted non-stop by the security police; she published Solidarity’s underground weekly with a print run of 60,000 a week, a record that is difficult to beat. Piotr Niemczycki, Gazeta’s first assistant editor in-chief, now vice chairman on the board of the holding company Agora (share capital approximately SEK 5.8 billions), is a trained philosopher and photographer. I remember a situations vacant ad in the early 90s. “You should preferably not have studied journalism.” Why not? “Journalism”, they replied, “we can teach that ourselves in six months. But sociology, Arabic or history, which you need to write in an informed way, we cannot teach that in the newsroom.”
It is almost a historical law that the mentality (or perhaps the type of personality) that sustains a brave resistance to despotism rarely comes into its own after the hour of liberation. The most efficient revolutionaries are either political ascetics (like Calvin or Robespierre) or inspired populists (like Mbeki or Walesa). When the revolution has succeeded, the former often become disappointed in their people, who do not want to pursue the work of purification to the bitter end, but start to save up for refrigerators, while the latter rarely resist the temptation to continue using their talents to stir up the masses against real or imagined enemies. Poland is no exception to this rule. Solidarity, which succeeded in the miraculous feat of shaking off the Soviet system without breaking a window pane, very rapidly fragmented after 1989, with the kind assistance of its own populist leader. Today the party that formed Poland’s first democratic government has been marginalised, the trade union is a populist, and shrinking, movement, and many of the intellectuals of that time have become misanthropic columnists. Solidarity’s ethos of personal Christianity, political liberalism, self-critical patriotism, libertarian romanticism (of the Byron type rather than the Herder type) and practical citizenship like the wine in the Bible was incapable of surviving in its own wineskins. On the other hand, it can survive in a modern media empire – the form that was clearly most alien to idealistic dissidents. (This is noticeable not least in the symbols. In this company power seems to be in inverse proportion to space. The chair of Agora’s board of directors, Wanda Rapaczynski – owner of a share package of approximately SEK 100 million and, according to the Wall Street Journal, among Europe’s 30 most influential women – has her office in a cubby hole that would have a Swedish branch manager calling for his safety representative. She has a background as a political emigrant after 1968, went on to American universities and the City Bank in New York.)
Gazeta Wyborcza’s rise from an enterprise in a cellar to a stock exchange comet, and Adam Michnik’s transformation from an unwavering dissident to a politician willing to compromise is edifying for some, disturbing for others. It is, in any case, rich in interesting complications
The paper is owned mostly by its employees, which insures independence (52% of the shares, which, however, only corresponds to 39% of the votes, are out on the market).
But just how rich is a journalist allowed to become? When Gazeta’s parent company Agora S.A., after eight years of expansion (19 local papers, acquiring 20 or so radio stations and advertising agencies), was launched on the London Stock Exchange in 1999, hundreds of employees – from crime reporters to cleaning ladies – woke up as multi-millionaires. Adam Michnik was the only one who refused his share, referring to the fact that it is unhealthy for a political editor in-chief to be rich, or to have a financial interest in his paper.
The price of this moral comfort is said to have come to eight figures. It was presumably necessary to pay. His political influence is so great that some wicked tongues call him “the Vice President”. Critics claim that Gazeta misuses its power by setting the agenda and defining away its opponents,that it shows undue deference, that Gazeta’s old dissidents have entered into a perverse alliance with the post-communists in the government. Michnik’s response – symbolically enough published on the newspapers 15th birthday – is a kind of public soul-searching, a desperate lament at the state of the nation, which at the same time summarises the dilemmas that exist in the transition between two systems. Adam Michnik apologises to his readers and friends: he has been too lenient towards the old Communists, too liberal in his economic stance, too illiberal in his political stance. And he himself has been guilty of the sin of pride: he believed that Gazeta Wyborcza and its editor in-chief were above all suspicion … but in the future he promises his readers a normal paper “which will carry out its journalistic duty”.
No Polish reader needs to puzzle over what is being referred to here. On 22 July Michnik received a visit from the well-known film producer Lew Rywin (The Pianist, Schindler’s List) who had excellent contacts in the ruling post-communist party. Rywin had a proposal: if Agora paid $17.5 million to him and his friends in the party, he could promise an amendment to the media law that would enable Agora to buy a nationwide TV station, something the company had desired for a long time. As to the question of who had sent him, Rywin answered: “the group in power”.
What Lew Rywin and did not know was that Michnik was taping this conversation. The same evening he approached the Prime Minister with the question: have you sent Rywin to me with this proposal? Leszek Miller denied this indignantly, called in Rywin who, weeping with fear, denied Miller’s involvement, but refused to say any more. This is “Rywingate”, Poland’s greatest corruption scandal, followed by two years of televised committee hearings, a preliminary inquiry, and a verdict. Rywin has been sentenced in the first instance to 2½ years imprisonment for “fraud”. According to the court he acted alone, a theory that almost no one in Poland believes.
Fact: according to the public opinion organisation OBOB, last autumn 19% of Poles had confidence in the Prime Minister, 17% in the Sejm (parliament), 68% in the Church and 70% in the daily newspapers.
What shook Michnik most was that anyone could believe that he, “with my CV”, could be involved in a bribery scandal. What puzzled his readers was that Gazeta took six months to reveal the scandal. Only in December 2002 did the matter become public, when the entire taped conversation was published in Gazeta Wyborcza. And what even to this day disturbs Michnik is that his explanation for this delay was not accepted immediately. With bitterness he quotes a scene from Stendhal which captures the rottenness in the French Restoration “a monsieur Leuwen comes to the conclusion that there is no longer any reason to be honourable – most people steal, and those who do not are not believed anyway.”
Why did he wait so long? First they wanted to assure themselves the entire affair was not some kind of provocation. Then the news was kept secret for completely different reasons:
“It was the autumn of 2002, the final stage of Poland’s negotiations on EU entry. To publish then risked fatally weakening the government’s position in these negotiations. After the referendum in Ireland, the government crisis in Holland and many French voices wanting to delay expansion, we did not want to take the risk. Perhaps we were wrong. But, had we published, people would instead have been able to accuse us of irresponsibility. There are important interests – and there are fundamental interests. Poland’s membership of Nato and the EU were for me such fundamental, overarching goals. For their sake, my newspaper has imposed some restrictions on itself. We have not censored the news, but neither have we criticised the government to the extent that it deserved. We have whispered when shouting was justified. We have been careful in criticising key countries in the union, measured out censure in clinically small doses in order not to upset anyone unnecessarily. But now, with Poland securely within Nato and the EU, we can become a normal newspaper.”
Is this not to confuse roles? On Aftenposten the editors are hardly worried about how their paper will be received by foreign powers. Michnik looked at me bemused.
“That may be true … but we are in a different situation. I can assure you that in the White House they can get irritated at French newspapers, and in the Quai d’Orsay they are irritated at American papers. In my paper, we do not write about the Ukraine in the way that we would like to; we write very carefully, because so much blood has flowed between our peoples. Reckless, subjectively Polish – we can be these things when we are investigating our own crimes, not those of the Ukrainians. Is this wrong?”
A British journalist, I say, would answer that it is wrong. Publish and be damned, he would say, because we have our roles …
“I would like to see the Brit you are talking about! Did he conduct long interviews with the IRA while the bombs were going off in London supermarkets? I think not. The journalist who hides behind the argument that he is only responsible for publishing, not for the consequences, is either a hypocrite or is deeply irresponsible. Every newsroom maintains a kind of political correctness, and I am not sure that is wrong. Can one imagine the New York Times publishing a venomous article about the objectionable behaviour of Afro-American citizens? I swear a great deal in the newsroom, but not in print. Is this self-censorship? Or is it solicitude for the climate of conversation? The thesis of the separate roles of politics and the press sounds attractive, but is not true. Every editor in-chief is in some sense active in politics, in that he knows that everything he does forms part of a context. I refused to publish a document revealing that in their youth, in the 1950s, a number of well-known people had written a letter denouncing outright a respected professor of Philosophy, Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, because his lectures were alleged to be bourgeois, or perhaps not sufficiently anti-religious. If today one were to point out these people as the black sheep of Stalinism – without at the same time reporting that they had later mended their ways – that would be an outright fraud on the reader. And vice-versa: if, in a book on Tatarkiewicz, one were not to include this list, that would also be a fraud. Facts taken out of context are no longer true. A classic example: it is a completely different thing to write about Polish anti-Semitism in Polish newspapers than in American newspapers. In Polish newspapers the case is clear, and they have a duty to devote themselves to it. In the world of American ideas this subject is to be found in a completely distorted context. And taken out of context it paints a picture of Poland as a country that is quite simply anti-semitic. Which is why I have no scruples when writing about this in Poland, but I use a completely different language when I talk about it in New York or in Australia. We are faced with many different choices – and they are moral choices. To claim that it is a matter of technicalities is pure cynicism.”
I make a final attempt. Reasons of state, I say, are, when it all boils down, the domain of government, whilst the press … Michnik looks at me as though I’m something that has escaped from the funny farm.
“Not at all! Reasons of state are the domain of every citizen!” Then he orders another whisky, whereupon I have time to think that the practical distribution of roles, which makes Swedish press debate so easily manageable, may only be possible in countries where history moves in slow-motion. But is he not worried that his readers will lose faith in a newspaper whose editor in-Chief is also a politician and diplomat at the same time?
“Not at all. You can lose popularity. But someone who wants everyone to love them should be playing in an orchestra, not editing a newspaper. We have paid a high price for having opposed anti-Semitism, for having de-communisation. You do not lose credibility if you clearly state on what grounds – values, insights, experiences – you base your point of view.
Adam Michnik has certainly not made things easy for himself. He has lost many friends from the resistance period, as he has viewed historically or politically things that they wanted him to view through the eyes of a former dissident. He has defended some old Communist functionaries (the same people who once kept him a prisoner) against various purges. Now he is – at least in part – apologising for this. He still considers that they deserve gratitude, as they had the courage and good judgment to relinquish power, “to overcome their own past”. It was right to refrain from purges. But, he writes, he regrets formulations which did not take into account the Poles’ legitimate demands for historical justice. (The price the Poles have paid for their failure to conduct a witch hunt of those previously in power is that many of them today are living far better lives than their victims.)
“I was however convinced that a revolution that consistently seeks historical justice ends in the executions of British monarchs, the Jacobin guillotine and the Bolshevik terror. A revolution that seeks freedom ends in dictatorship.
Adam Michnik is the sworn enemy of nationalism, in particular Polish nationalism. Some critics maintain that he even has “nationalism on the brain”, where it obscures what they consider to be Poland’s more modern problems. Which is why it was rather surprising that, in the negotiations on the EU constitution, he supported the Polish viewpoint which (like that of Spain) demanded over-representation for their countries. If you want a citizens’ Europe, why then kick up a fuss about national votes … ?
“These are the realities! You know the story about the Belgian army: ‘Walloons to the right, Flemings to the left’, orders the colonel. So one man is left in the centre. ‘Where are the Belgians to stand?’, he wonders. ‘And your name is?’, asks the colonel. ‘Rabinovitz’
Of course there are real Europeans here and there. But we live in a Europe of nations, and if you pretend anything else you are deluding yourself. It is no mere coincidence that Germany demands that Poland should recognise its German minority, but will not recognise any minority in Germany. These are facts. When Germany defend its own interests, for example by demanding that Poland should raise its taxes, then this is presented as European thinking. When Poland demands that Germany open its labour market to Poles, this is considered to be an expression of ethnic egoism. A little illogical isn’t it? You cannot expect that Poles, who have suffered so long for national independence, should suddenly declare themselves to be Europeans. It takes time. But even my son’s generation will reason quite differently from me.”
Just a week after Poland had joined the EU, Adam Michnik suggested that the union should be expanded further. In an article written together with the Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Justjenko (published in El País and Gazeta Wyborcza), he claims that hopes of EU membership are decisive for a democratisation of the Ukraine. Now Michnik expresses himself more clearly:
“A Ukraine without the EU in sight means Russian expansion westwards. Ukraine will be swallowed up by Russia.
His friend Joschka Fischer also argues for further expansion. “the strategic task”, he said in an interview in Berliner Zeitung on 28 February, “is to create stability among Europe’s neighbours, including the Middle East. And the way there goes through Turkey.” Joschka Fischer’s idea was not well received in France. It has also been claimed that the entire struggle to include Christianity in the preface to the EU constitution was really aimed at keeping the Turks out. The Polish government and Michnik himself have argued for a “Christian” version.
“But there is no conflict here! No one wants to shut out the Muslims. Islam already exists in Europe; just go out on the street in Paris or Stockholm. If Turkey’s membership opens up a perspective for the Islamic world, then I’ll buy that argument. The problem is of a different kind. The European tradition is unintelligible, illegible and dishonest without its Christian element. Just as Scandinavia is unintelligible without Protestantism and Russia without the Orthodox Church.”
400 years of Islam in the Balkans do not count?
“They count. But it was certainly not Islam that created what we understand as Europe. I am not thinking any longer of taking up the cudgels for that cause, but no other Europe exists than what was based on Athenian democracy, Roman law, Christian caritas and the ideas of the Enlightenment.”
Maciej Zaremba
© Maciej Zaremba. Denna text är skyddad av lagen om upphovsrätt. Eftertryck, annan kopiering eller publicering är förbjudet utan tillstånd.