How is this different from what U.S. journalists do when reporting and not reporting about government criminals?
[From article]
With New Year fireworks, Western media opened a frontal attack on the new Polish government formed after a landslide election victory by the Law and Justice Party (PIS). In 2015, the PIS won both presidential and parliamentary elections, and for the first time since WWII, removed entrenched post-communist forces from power in Poland. To the surprise of many Polish people, American media reacted with anger to this development, announcing that in Poland a radical right-wing government was formed and overnight introduced a dictatorship. Poland’s so-called “disturbing tilt to the right” was of grave concern to the Western media, which had been dutifully supporting the previous post-communist government of the Civic Platform (“PO”) and PSL coalition. Protests against “violation of democracy” and “Putinization of Poland” reverberated across the West.
[. . .]
The Western media were outraged that the PIS government challenged the appointment of five judges to the Constitutional Court hastily pushed through the parliament by the previous PO/PSL coalition. They failed to report, however, that the constitutional crisis in Poland resulted from the illegal attempt of the PO/PSL coalition to force its 14 judges to the 15-member Constitutional Court in the final days of the parliament term.
[. . .]
A similar constitutional crisis occurred almost simultaneously in Venezuela. The party in power that was about to lose elections stacked the Supreme Court with their own appointments just before elections. The difference in reporting on these two similar cases is astonishing. The Venezuelan case received a detailed coverage. All relevant facts were provided and arguments of both sides were clearly presented. No one called the struggle over the Supreme Court in Venezuela as a coup d’état. Instead, constitutional law experts provided arguments for both sides of the conflict. No one raised concerns about “putinization” of Venezuela.
[. . .]
With respect to Poland, Western media disregarded the obligation to provide diverse viewpoints and responsible content. Paradoxically, this serious failure to provide balanced reporting took place while the media were accusing the new Polish government of violating freedom of speech and freedom of press.
[. . .]
A massive wave of firings in all Polish media took place in 2010, in the aftermath of the crash of Polish Air Force One in Smolensk, Russia. At the time, nearly all independently thinking journalists were removed from the mainstream media without a single complaint from the Western watchdogs of free speech and human rights. The publisher of a leading daily, Rzeczpospolita, was almost destroyed by the PO/PSL government for revealing that samples from the Smolensk crash site tested positive for explosives.
[. . .]
The gap between Western myths and the reality of contemporary Poland is alarming. To most Americans, Lech Walesa remains a symbol of victory over communism. Thus far, no Western historian has been willing to take on the subject of what the archives reveal about Lech Walesa. But in Poland everybody knows that Walesa was a communist collaborator used by the Jaruzelski regime to assure communist forces in Poland a smooth transformation into free marketeers with all their powers and privileges intact.
[. . .]
The year 2009 leading up to April 10, 2010 was marked by an unprecedented media onslaught on President Lech Kaczynski. He was attacked and ridiculed for his every move and every word. His every public appearance was used to discredit him in the eyes of the public. All the mainstream media were engaged in the massive assault on President Lech Kaczynski. Looking back, the statement of a Russian FSB agent Alexander Litwinienko made just before his untimely death that the public must be adequately prepared for a political assassination was prophetic.
On the morning of April 10, 2010, President Lech Kaczynski, the entire Central Command of the Polish Armed Forces, and representatives of the patriotic elite of Polish society evaporated in the crash of the Polish Air Force One in Smolensk, Russia. Poland froze.
[. . .]
Providing half-truths was not sufficient either. The most common tool used by the PO/PSL media was the practice of discrediting those who disagreed with them.
[. . .]
those who dared to challenge the official version of the Smolensk crash were brutally discredited as conspiracy theorists, some key opponents committed so-called suicides. Public discourse became one gigantic manipulation.
[. . .]
communist victims were turned into oppressors, Solidarity real heroes became renegades, and efforts to demand accountability for communist crimes were discredited as ill motivated.
[. . .]
One commentator observed that watching these post-communists from KOD protesting against violations of democracy in Poland is like watching the Gestapo and SS protesting against anti-Semitism.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/media_vs_democracy_the_case_of_poland.html
March 5, 2016
Media vs. Democracy: The Case of Poland
By Maria Szonert Binienda
