Rzeczpospolita (newspaper)

Rzeczpospolita is Poland's second largest nationwide daily newspaper with a circulation of 260–270,000 and an estimated readership of 1.3 million. The title may be rendered as "The Republic", but see Rzeczpospolita for more about this word.

Issued every day except Sunday, Rzeczpospolita is printed in broadsheet format and maintains a more elitist and "deadpan" image than, e.g., its stronger liberal rival Gazeta Wyborcza or the more distinctly conservative and populist daily Życie ("Life"), both of which are of compact size and also incorporate elements of the yellow press. Rzeczpospolita's political profile is moderately conservative and arguably comparable to that of British The Times. It does not favour any particular party within Poland's present political landscape, although it shares some views of the largest opposition party, the centrist to right of center Platforma Obywatelska (Citizens Platform).

A striking feature is the paper's division into three thematic sections with a distinct colour for each: The main news section is white, the business section is green, the legal section is yellow. Apart from these daily sections, there are several supplements appearing once or twice per week, such as cars and real estate, careers, TV, travel. On Saturdays, the paper is supplemented with a section entitled PlusMinus for essays on politics, history, and culture, often invited from well-known authors, which reflect a broad spectrum of opinions.

In addition to comprehensive daily legal and financial reports, Rzeczpospolita frequently publishes rankings on companies, institutions and government authorities, and claims to be most influential newspaper among Polish economic elites and political decision-makers.

History

Although it may seem unlikely given the Rzeczpospolita's present profile, it emerged from an eponymous communist government paper which first appeared in July 1944, when a Soviet-led administration was established behind the lines of the Soviet Army advancing against the erstwhile Nazi German occupying forces. As the Polish population's attitude was vehemently anti-communist, the new government newspaper consciously adopted the name Rzeczpospolita, which had previously been the name of the right-wing "Christian National Party" (Stronnictwo Chrześcijańsko-Narodowe), in an attempt to establish more legitimacy. After the founding of the Polish United Workers' Party in 1949, which edited its own central organ as Tribuna Ludu ("People's Tribune"), the two newspapers appeared parallel to each other for some two years. In 1950, Rzeczpospolita was discontinued as the co-existence of a party and government newspaper was considered unnecessary within a consolidated one-party state.

By 1980, this situation had changed. The state was in crisis, and the Party's image had been damaged beyond repair. This inspired the idea to relaunch a separate government newspaper in an attempt to emphasise the fact that the state as an entity was officially independent from the Party (even though this independence was, of course, largely ficticious within a communist state). Thus, from 1982 onwards, Rzeczpospolita and Trybuna Ludu resumed their parallel existence as official bulletins of the government and the Party apparatus respectively.

This dualism corresponded to the situation in the Soviet Union, where the government newspaper Izvestia functioned alongside the Party's Pravda, and where Izvestia has steered a course strikingly similar to Rzeczpospolita's in the 1990s.

After the revolution, the new Polish government released Rzeczpospolita into independence in 1991, forming a Franco-Polish joint venture named Presspublica S.A. to publish the paper. In 1996, the Norwegian Orkla Media corporation acquired a 51% share in Presspublica, and is now in joint control of a quarter of the entire Polish press landscape.

From 1989 until his death in 1996, the well-known journalist Dariusz Fikus was the first editor-in-chief of the independent Rzeczpospolita, followed by Piotr Aleksandrowicz (1996-2000), Maciej Łukasiewicz (2000-2004), and Grzegorz Gauden (since 2004).

In early 2005, Rzeczpospolita found itself at the very centre of a heated public debate, after one of its employees, the former dissident and journalist Bronisław Wildstein, abstracted a list with the names of 240,000 informers and victims of the communist secret police from the Institute of National Remembrance and distributed it among colleagues. In the wake of the incident, Wildstein was dismissed from Rzeczpospolita (cf. the article Wildstein's List in the Polish Wikipedia).

External links

rp.pl – Rzeczpospolita's website (Polish only) Some information in English