The Media and Intra-Elite Communication in Poland: Organization and Control of the Media

The Rand Corporation is conducting a multiyear comparative study of the role of the media in intra-elite communication in Communist countries. Western analysts of the political process in closed Communist systems necessarily rely heavily on the published and broadcast output of the mass and specialized media. These media are in part propaganda organs, but they also have other functions. A generation of Sovietologists has had to base much of its analysis of policies and politics on interpretations of media nuances. Yet their assumptions about the relationship between the media and the political actors whose behavior or attitudes are inferred from them have received little attention. The Rand study was initiated to fill this need. Its emphasis is not on techniques of content analysis, but rather on the process by which politically significant material appears in Communist-country media. The principal data base of the study is information obtained from interviews with 44 emigres formerly involved in the media process as writers, journalists, editors, censors, and government and Party officials. The results of this study are published in a Summary Report, which provides an overview and conclusions, and in a series of Rand Notes, which contain more detailed analyses and documentation of the research. This Note examines the structural and organizational factors that influence the output of Polish media. Section II reviews the changing position of the media in the Polish Communist system in the postwar period and provides a basis for understanding both the important general distinctions among the Stalinist, 1956, Gomulka, and Gierek periods and related changes in the instruments of Party control. Section III examines the various instruments by which the Party exercises direct and indirect supervision over the media. Sections IV and V describe key elements of the internal organization and editorial process, respectively, that affect the output of Polish media organs.