Such conclusions were reached by participants in the panel devoted to conditions for a fair public debate, which was led by Paweł Lisicki, the editor-in-chief of „Rzeczpospolita“ daily. In the beginning the discussion was dominated by polemics with the thesis of Jacek Karnowski, the head of the editorial team of TVP Panorama news, that a genuine public debate is still missing in Poland. – Frequently, what seems to be a debate from foreign perspective, in Poland boils down to watching a political show. Politicians are expected to serve such roles, and not to have ideas for solving specific problems - claimed Karnowski.
This view was not shared by Frederik Pleitgen, a CNN correspondent in Berlin. – On many occasions, I became convinced that not the media create a grotesque image of politicians, but instead they play such roles on their own.
- A fair public debate depends on two parameters. First of all, participants in the debate should be fair. It means that politicians should present their programmes in a reliable, and not a populist way. The second indispensable condition is fairness of the media themselves – said Grzegorz Kozak from Polsat Television.
According to Frederik Pleitgen, social media can be a method to find a way out of the deadlock, in which plunged the public debate. – For example blogs or community portals. If I do something wrong, comments can appear immediately in my account on Facebook saying that I write nonsense – added the CNN correspondent in Berlin.
In the opinion of Grzegorz Kozak, voices pertaining to the content often do not appear in discussions on Internet portals. It is even more difficult to expect that an average reader would browse through hundreds of commentaries searching for the few appropriate ones.
