Dziennikarze, ideolodzy, rewizjoniści w Polsce przełomu lat 50. i 60. Role i osobliwości strategii komunikacyjnych

Abstract

The subject of the analysis, as presented, are the relations between journalists and politicians in Poland in the 1950s and the 1960s. The attention is focused on the journalists who, in the conditions of the authoritarian system, engaged in the promotion of its rules (in this particular case the rules of Communism) and then diametrically changed their attitudes. It was Marxist revisionists who stood out in political communication. The term was used to define leftist intellectuals,members of the hegemonic Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) who, after 1956, were criticalof the policy, postulating and expecting intrasystemic reforms. When they began to present a non-dogmatic way of thinking, representatives of an older generation, appointed to editorial boards to exert control, could be included amongst revisionists as could be more junior journalists, educated in the system but without the experience which would hamper their form of expression. The first were associated with one of the factions within the ruling party, and the other were more involved in academic life or non-political but creative work. Texts were published in thethen-popular weeklies with a social/literary or social/political profile which differed in their contents from the previous ones, standardised and censored during Stalinism. Because the liberalisation of censorship was short-term the control over the press was something normal; various methods were used to reach readers with information and demonstrate the non-homogeneity of views or opinions. Use was made of stylistic means not typical of journalistic writings, references to literature, specifically selected citations from classicists of Marxism. What mattered were informal exchanges which communicated, for instance, texts challenged by censorship or editors. Revisionists did contribute to a change in the discourse and de-legitimisation of the system of power, regardless of whether they actually contested the foundations of communist ideology, irregularities of political practice, and political leadership, or were just accused thereof.