Can You imagine a country without a daily newspaper? A country where You have nothing to read, nothing to buy in the morning? Where You board a train without buying anything at a newsstand, because there is only yellow press sold? What can buy an intelligent person, if on the market there are only tabloids? The best of our tabloids reaches the level of Daily Mail and are treated as if they were ordinary press.

How many years do we have to wait? How many letters to European editors do we have to write? Is quality journalism such a bad business? Is a market of 36 million consumers a bad one to offer a proper daily newspaper if there are no competitors on the market?

There are lots of dumb people in this country, but our nation consists also of some wanna-be-intelectuals, consists of millions of private entrepreneurs, of thousands of higher officials and so on. Although the general level of education is rather low, there are some artists, people that grew in multicultural environement.

There is no newspaper of record at the moment. We have some yellow press that is considered as radically postcommunist, as Polish tabloid called “Wyborcza”, founded by pro-communist politicians, some of which became later known as intellectual leaders of Polish Postcommunism. On the other side we have some two or three pro-governmental tabloids, that seem as if they were edited by the government itself. If they have some “European level” content, then only in one case, and only in Saturday edition.

Unfortunatelly there is virtually nothing normal to read. And, nothing is changing for better, as there is no place for intellectual debate. Public media are non-existent, they are public in ownership, not in function, besides public television is controlled by a former Neonazi, Mr. Piotr Farafal, who allegedly still raises racist controversies with his comments on black people.

How many letters do we have to send, so that businesspeople would take profit of providing our population with a quite normal daily newspaper of record? If quality newspapers are some lighthouses of wisdom, then we have to live in darkness of middle-ages. We can communitate by blogs, Internet communities or some independent quarterly magazines, sometimes even photocopied, as in the times of Communist regime. People of science cannot even inform one another of progresses in their areas.

There is really very little on the market. Well, if You watch the covers, everything seems normal, similar, but if You search a wee little deeper, You find that it is the content that has a dramatically bad quality in Polish case.

We believe in forces of free market. We believe that there are some businesspeople who can provide us with some lighthouses of hope at least.

Yours faithfully

Adam Fularz,

Independent economist, privately a fan of modern minimalist composers.