The Media and Intra-Elite Communication in Poland: The System of Censorship

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. The Main Administration for Control of the Press, Publications, and Public Performances GUKPPiW is formally responsible for all censorship. GUKPPiW must monitor every public word in Poland, from obituaries to the mass media and artistic performances. To do this, its censors rely on their own sense of what is politically and culturally appropriate on the political position and power of a contributor and the contributing producer and on direct and indirect instructions and responses from Party and state institutions. This Note describes the censorship process in Poland and the ways in which GUKPPiW and other informal controls determine what information is made public.