Walery Pisarek

Press Research Centre as a phenomenon

The Press Research Centre in Cracow is presented here as a phenomenon or something extremely unusual. The circumstances of its creation in the Polish People’s Republic in 1956 were already quite unusual. A small group of young people were allowed to set up a research laboratory within the framework of the big press publishing house. They were wise and modest enough to invite prominent and well-known university sociologists, psychologists, linguists, economists, historians, lawyers, etc. to cooperate with in the study of mass communication. After three decades, the small provincial laboratory became a research institute with a national range, recognizable globally among researchers of mass media and public communication. It has enriched with the significant publications almost every field of knowledge on periodic mass communication and, in particular, the history of the press (re-release of the first Polish newspaper from the 17th century), social and psychological factors of the reception of the media (based on opinion polls), descriptions of the content of periodic mass media (based on systematic content analyzes), linguistics (the first Polish frequentative dictionary of the language in newspapers and description of the propaganda language of the 1970s), the press law (compendium: law on the press), the economics of the periodical media (“Press as a commodity and enterprise”),

This paper focuses on the particular role of the mass media research in transformation of the post-Yaltan world political system, in 1960–1990 and in particular in the seventies. The role of the inspirer, organizer and transmitter of the idea of solving social and political problems with the use of the mass media was played by the UN and UNESCO. They made communication research one of the most important and politically most infl uential disciplines among social sciences. The conference in Montreal, organized by Unesco in June 1969, has become the foundation stone for the worldwide political career of mass communication research. Very active participation of media researchers in the world discourse on communication contributed later to the adoption, by the UNESCO General Conference, in 1978, of the “Media Declaration”, and, in consequence, to the MacBride Commission and the creation of its Report, then to the “International Program for the Development of Communication” (IPDC). Communication research in the seventies contributed, arguably, to the acceptance of the compromise solutions of the 3rd basket of the Final Act of the CSCE, which opened the first legal clefts to the uncontrolled two direction flow of information in the Soviet monolith hermetic system. In this regard, one can say that Everything started in Montreal in 1969 – the paper concludes.
The paper was presented on the plenary session of the International Conference “Matters of Journalism: Understanding Professional Challenges and Dilemmas”, organized by the Polish Communication Association and the University of Gdańsk, in Gdańsk 14 September, 2012.