The aim of this paper is to offer a theoretical background for studies on political communication that focus on the role of the audience in the flow of political messages. We start with normative models of democracy and their demands upon citizens and the concept of political information environment. By employing these two concepts, we are able to focus on two dimensions of citizens’ roles in political communication, that is expectations towards media users who are perceived here as citizens, as well as citizens’ expectations towards news media disseminating political information. A combination of the aforementioned concepts provides us with a theoretical background for studies on actual news media consumption and related phenomena, such as news avoidance and selective media exposure.

The aim of the study is to consider whether Twitter’s electoral communication reflects a crisis of political leadership. After analysing the content of tweets published by candidates in the 2018 election of the mayor of Warsaw and measuring the degree of engagement of their followers, the answer to this question is ambiguous. The existence of a leadership crisis is supported by the emphasis of politicians on image issues (presentations of campaign activity focused on the person of the candidate with the important role of the politician’s commentary) and the high degree of supporters’ engagement in non-programme content compared to programmatic content. On the other hand, significant differences in the level of occurrence of program topics between candidates show that Twitter does not determine the resignation from the strategy of building relationships with supporters in the context of program goals.

The aim of the article was to reconstruct the image of the initial stage of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the time immediately preceding it, in the Polish opinion dailies Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita. It was verified which of the interpretive frame, as defined by Holli Semetko and Patti Valkenburg, was the dominant one, which tópoi (natural vs. cultural) dominated in the research sample and how the number and exposure of press texts were changing, alongside the intensity of press coverage regarding the Russia’s war in Ukraine. The content analysis method, the framing analysis concept, the priming concept and the locus communis concept were used in the research. The frame of conflict and the frame of human affairs were the dominant frames in Polish opinion dailies. Rzeczpospolita also noted a high degree of saturation of publications with the economic consequences frame. Cultural tópoi prevailed over natural ones. The most numerously represented natural tópoi were: the right to freedom and security, human dignity, the right to life, while the cultural tópoi were: the politics of superpowers, the economic consequences of war, migration and refugees. The greatest interest of Polish dailies in Russia’s war in Ukraine took place just after February 24, 2022, whilst the “freshness effect” decreased only slightly with the passage of time. The article increases the cognitive value in the area of research on the image of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the Polish opinion press.

The article’s main objective is to analyse the statements made by politicians from the United Right regarding their methods of arousing social fears and generating an enemy. The starting point is the concept of three levels of fear proposed by Martha Nussbaum: fears arising from actual events that create uncertainty, the displacement of fear onto someone/something unrelated to the actual problem but serving as a convenient substitute (scapegoating), and the employment of the idea of a hidden/imaginary enemy. These three aspects are applied to analysing narratives concerning refugees, Donald Tusk and the LGBT+ community, and “gender ideology”. These narratives align with the concept of “fear management”, understood as a manipulative strategy that aims to eliminate undesirable ideas/groups from the discourse by arousing fears towards specific phenomena and individuals, while positioning those in power as guarantors of security. The research material is also examined through the lens of Niklas Luhmann’s (2009) information selection criteria, whose concepts of social systems and the reality of mass media are adopted as the guiding theory.

Political parallelism is one of the theoretical categories used to classify media systems and summarise the relationships occurring in the media under the influence of politics and in politics under the influence of the media. The aim of the article, a review work, is to analyse the issue of political parallelism concerning the classic concepts of C. Seymour‑Ure, J.G. Blumler, and M. Gurevitch, as well as D.C. Hallin and P. Mancini, and to present different positions criticising the usefulness of these theories for the study of countries other than Western European ones. The study also presents the adequacy of applying the classic concepts of political parallelism to analyses regarding the Federative Republic of Brazil. The thesis of this case study is that the classic theories of political parallelism do not fully allow for determining the relationships between the sphere of politics and the media in this country. The thesis was adopted as a result of long-term and holistic analyses of the characteristics of Brazil’s political and media systems. A systematic literature review was used (Fink 2005, p. 17), which makes it possible to learn the essence of the phenomenon and formulate conclusions, and the qualitative methods used, despite their problems (Flick 2002, pp. 5–24), as well as systemic analysis, complete the whole.

Media transparency has been seen as an important principle in media policy and regulation for a long time. Overall, this study attempts to offer three contributions. First, it provides theoretical conceptualization of transparency as a relational concept involving three collective actors – media, state and citizens. Second, it introduces the concept of “reciprocal transparency”. Third, it explores regulatory trends and possibilities concerning reciprocal transparency under the proposed draft of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA).

This research results from the project Media Freedom, Trust and Transparency in the European Union (FREEMED) and was supported by the European Commission (grant reference: Jean Monnet Chair - 611085-EPP-1-2019-1-PL-EPPJMO-CHAIR).

A study on the perception of artificial intelligence in Poland indicates a growing awareness of this concept. However, many people still have false ideas about this, often confusing AI with automation or robotisation. The survey results suggest that Polish people are confused and do not fully understand what artificial intelligence is. The article presents the results of research based on a systematic review of available internet sources regarding public opinion on artificial intelligence in Poland. A total of 12 different studies, conducted in the six years to 2023, were analysed. The analysis of the research material allowed for drawing five main conclusions regarding: 1) understanding the concept, 2) experiencing the presence of technological artifacts, 3) the scope of acceptance for intelligent machines, 4) the issue of substitutability and 5) confusion. The conclusions from the analysis suggest that Polish people are beginning to understand the role of artificial intelligence, but they still have many questions and concerns about it, and as AI becomes more popular in everyday life, further changes in the way it is perceived can be expected.

In the article, the authors, based on audience and readership surveys of Poznan media, in particular those conducted by the CATI method in April 2022 by the Institute for Market and Social Research IBRiS, analyse the possibility of using traditional media, especially local television, in the next local government election campaign in 2024, in provincial cities. The example of Poznań is treated as a case study. The authors attempt to grapple with the increasingly popular hypothesis that, especially in metropolitan areas, new media, mainly social media, are becoming the most important channel of electoral communication. In their analysis, they try to show that despite the dynamic growth in the importance of online news portals, local groups, individual fan sites of politicians and social activists, the growing opinions about the “death” of television are exaggerated (if anything, one can talk about the disappearance of the importance of the printed press), and the choice of media depends on the target group, with traditional media, especially local televisions, continuously serving as an important channel for reaching a part of the electorate.

Peter Bull, Maurice Waddle: The Psychology of Political Communication: Politicians Under the Microscope. Routledge. London, New York 2023, s. 182.

Rafał Śpiewak: Społeczeństwo – naród – państwo na łamach Gościa Niedzielnego (1923–1939). Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego w Katowicach. Katowice 2022, s. 519.