Peter Leese, British by birth, living and working as a historian in Poland. A media user of both British and Polish sources - especially newspapers, radio and television.
Answers
- While certain media sources do seek to educate and inform - BBC Radio 4, The Guardian, The Independent - audiences gravitate towards the sources to which they are temperamentally inclined. There is a collusion between audience and media sources in subjects of interest and subjects of output. Education and information are not distinct from entertainment. The distinction is more between greater and lower degrees of entertainment versus education.
- Reith notoriously imposed his own agenda on the BBC and gave people what he believed they needed. It is equally disingenuous to say that what draws highest ratings is ‘what people need’.
- No. Objectivity is clearly impossible. The difficulty is not with what is objective or not, as with what is recognizably and acknowledgeable subjective. The question is rather to what degrees is the media subjective, and what purposes does its subjectivity serve.
- It depends on what source you have in mind. Polish state TV is credulous habitually; British TV - particularly the BBC - is incredulous habitually in its news presentations. British and Polish radio are a bit patchy, better budgets sometimes give Britain the edge. Newspapers in Poland are fortunately less influential than in Britain - the media blanket is less suffocating; they are also, unfortunately, less influential in that investigative journalism is not as powerful as it should be.
- Freedom of speech does not require any restriction - as long as the power to reply is equal. Freedom of images requires some restraint. Freedom of the market precludes restraint.
- I listen to terrestrial radio stations on the internet. I can choose the programmes, but also the times I want to listen. Polish TV has more grown-up programmes; Polish newspapers - Gazeta Wyborcza especially - has more intelligent and challenging articles.
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