Poland is a great nation with a quite long and complicated history¹. It is the ninth largest country in Europe following Russia, Ukraine, France, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Finland and Norway and the 63rd biggest country in the world². Poland has borders with seven other European countries – Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Germany and its general terrain accounts for 1.4 percent of Europe's total surface area (312,685km2).³
Poland is a democratic republic; its capital is Warsaw and population is more than
38,700,000. Life expectancy in Poland is 73 years and the common ethnic groups represented in this country consists of 98% Polish, 1% German, 1% Ukrainian and Belarusian. Also, approximately 40% of the Polish economy still stands in the hands of the government.4 This is also true towards Polish media because even nowadays there are many politicians in Poland from several parties that are still trying to control the management of public radio and television.
When communist system was gone in 1989, Poland started to develop its free media. New press law was accepted in congress, newspapers were privatized and commercial radio and television stations received their licenses. At the end of all this change, foreign media companies started to invest in Poland3.
However, before this change, Polish media was all about providing information towards their “masters in power than their recipients13.” Media was all about propaganda, not information. The media system was centralized and the largest media - public radio and television - were grouped into the Radio and Television Committee.
The Polish press market itself developed actively in the first half of the 1990’s. The number of newspapers and magazines published in 1990-1995 increased by approximately half, from 3,007 in 1990 to 4,340 in 1995. By 2001, there were already 5,837 press titles - local and nationwide newspapers, dailies, weeklies, monthlies and specific interest oriented papers6.
Before 1989, local press was fairly rare in Poland, but at the start of the 1990’s, there was no region of the country which did not challenge itself by publishing a regional, local or neighborhood newspaper, or newsletter. The appearance of new titles, together with the local press, took place at the same time when the development of self-governance and the formation of the civil society in Poland took place.
However, the development of the Polish media is not simply a matter of a growing number of new titles. At the very beginning of 1990’s, the press also had some problems, because they did not really know how to function in a free market, and also a problem arose because of the need to change the ways of thinking of those who managed the media. Both of these problems were direct consequences of communism.…
