Polish Politicians Clinging to the Past

Beatroot wrote a nice post on the new law that requires all journalists, possibly even bloggers, to be vetted for communist collaboration. All in all, just another move by the Kaczynski government to hurt the unfriendly journalists. After all, why would the media criticize the Duck Republic unless it was loaded full of communist sympathizers and former agents?

The biggest problem here is not the search for collaborators. It's the fact that the government is forcing private citizens, working for private companies, to do this. What's next? Infidelity declarations?

Beatroot's solution: Kick out all the old era, revenge, us-vs-them politicians. Not a bad idea...

DISCLOSURE: Yours truly never collaborated with the communists and holds some strong dislike towards all who willingly collaborated. Of course, since I was born in 1974, I was a little too young to really do much in those days. So where do I sign my declaration? No, wait, I'll boycott it, even though the law doesn't really cover me.

Is This a (Polish) Joke?

Seems like this little cartoon in the New Yorker is causing quite a stir among the Polish community in Gotham City and elsewhere. The magazine editor's somewhat shaky explanation is that "the heart of the joke is the difficulty in saying the name." In this vain, my parents must have been on drugs when they named me Krzysztof, forgetting to put a few extra vowels in there.

So is this a Polish joke? Is this suggesting that Poles like to hit the bottle too often? I have mixed feelings on this one.

Perhaps we do get a little thin-skinned when it comes to the images portrayed in influential media outlets, such as the venerable New Yorker. But even if it wasn't meant to slight Poles, it's not doing us any favors. And these things do stick, especially considering the long and nasty list of Polish jokes preceding them.

On the other hand, maybe we should also be known for taking a joke or two and just chill out? What do you think?

Lepper's Coup - Is Media At Fault in Sex Scandal?

Self Defence leader Andrzej Lepper with his usual flair for overaggeration and hysterics, has already called it a coup attemp and called for the closure (!) of Gazeta Wyborcza. But is Poland's media at fault here for the sex scandal that has been consuming Lepper's party. Is Lepper right?

The answer, mostly, is no. Wyborcza, no lover of Lepper, has perhaps jumped the gun with its sex scandal story a week ago before investigating all the lose ends. And, from what I had seen, some of its journalists were too eager to sell the story instead of remaining as neutral as possible in the light of imminent accusations from Herr Leader and his posse. But the story itself was well reported and had collaborating evidence from other women and former Self Defense officials. At least one more woman has come forward to speak of work-for-sex set up in the party. Something certainly stinks there and Wyborcza had a duty to expose this sad situation.

And it wasn't just Wyborcza that pushed the story foward. Aneta Krawczyk revealed herself and fresh allegations on TVN's respected news show Now Us, the same one that had only a few weeks ago showed the video tapes by another Self Defense politician being offered political favors for swithching to the Kaczynski brothers' party. Other newspapers and TV channels chimed in with their own charges. It is the duty of news organizations to seek the truth, even if its quite messy.

And closing a leading newspaper? This is not Belarus, no matter how much Lepper and Co. have been trying to take Poland on that path. Last time I checked Krawczyk was on top of Self Defense's electorate list earlier this year and ran the office of the man she later accused of harassing her. So if Self Defense found her that reliable shouldn't Lepper consider closing down his own party now? They groomed her for this.

Polish media doesn't have the cleanest hands in this affair, even as evidenced by the mad scene on the day Krawczyk and her daughter arrived for their DNA testing. There should be some rethinking of some newsgathering tactics. But in the end, most of the media outlets did exactly what they should have -- air out the truth.

American Media on Polish Immigrants in Europe

The new immigrant wave of Poles heading to Britain, Ireland and other EU member states has grown massive enough to be seen, well, in this case heard, across the ocean. Check out this piece on National Public Radio in the U.S.

NPR has strong foreign coverage, unlike most main media outlets here, and seems to be ahead of the curve on this story. But I wouldn't be surprised if other news organization do their own pieces on Polish migration. I'm sure they will be more subdued than some of the garbage running in UK papers.

I don't imagine this will help in the drive to get rid of U.S. visas for Poles. But then again Poles seem to be doing quite well finding jobs in Europe, so perhaps fewer would head all the way here.

Discovering Polish TV Pirates in Chicago

Earlier this week, while doing a little research at the federal court house in Chicago, I came across a case involving Polish television station TVN (my former employer from waaaay back when it was just being launched). Turns out TVN was suing some people in Chicago for putting their television programs on the Internet -- without permission, of course -- and charging people to stream or download them. I found one more case like that involving TVN and then located two more cases against the same people brought by TVN's competitor, Polsat. All four cases involving two web sites, Telewizja Plus and Polska Wizja, were filed on the same day in May. Both sites are pretty much dead now.

So I forwarded the complaints and related documents to my pal Vadim Makarenko at Gazeta Wyborcza, still Poland's largest daily. Vadim, in my humble opinion the best media reporter in Poland, decided to look further into the matter. And today Wyborcza is running a nice long story entitled: How Polsat and TVN are battling Internet pirates (in Polish). Pretty cool intercontinental cooperation, I must say.