Media pushing for political transformation: A comparative analysis of issue contestation in Poland before 1989 and Egypt before 2011

Abstract

This article compares two cases of media reporting on the crucial contesting issue of brutality carried out by security forces that proved to be relevant for delegitimizing the regimes in both Poland in 1989 and Egypt in 2011. We show that, despite the different technological infrastructure available and the distinct institutionalization of the political and media systems, we can observe similar mechanisms of mass media communication unfolding around a contesting issue that shook the pillars of moral legitimacy of the regimes, thus paving the way for political transformation.

Keywords

Contesting issue Eastern Europe Jerzy Popiełuszko journalism Khaled Said legitimacy media North Africa political change transformation

Introduction

Can media contribute to political transformation in authoritarian regimes? Literature on the Islamic Revolution in Iran (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi, 1994), the breaking open of the Iron Curtain in 1989 (Downing, 1996), and the Arab uprisings in 2011 (Khamis and Vaughn, 2011) suggests that media can indeed help to publicly break taboos, to mobilize opposition and to place pressure on incumbent regimes. However, it has rarely been traced exactly how this process evolves and what mechanisms are at work in a stage before the actual breakdown of a regime. In this study, we take a step back: we do not focus on the role of media in mobilizing protest like most of the previous studies have done. Instead, we assume that before mobilization even comes into play, media in particular play a role in the delegitimization of authoritarian incumbents by promoting a publicly visible contestation of the core pillars of ruling. Most likely, these pillars include legitimacy on economic and moral grounds, which can be shaken in times of crises (Merkel, 2010). We therefore investigate how and why contesting issues unfold in an often strictly controlled media sphere, and we show how resulting contesting interpretations help shake the pillars of legitimacy of authoritarian regimes.

This article compares two cases of media reporting on the crucial contesting issue of brutality of security forces in two distinct periods that can be retrospectively interpreted as being highly relevant for the systemic transformation in Poland in 1989 and in Egypt in 2011. We suggest that, despite the differences in technological infrastructure and an institutionalization of the political and media systems, we can observe similar mechanisms of mass media communication paving the way for political transformation in different historical periods.

We start by providing a theoretical framework for the role of media and contesting issues in transformation processes before we explain the two case studies in their respective political and media system contexts. Then we describe our methodology of comparative content analysis of the media discourse. The results are then presented in a comparative way, explaining first how the contesting issue got public attention in the official mass media; second, how the events were covered over time; and third, how contesting interpretations unfolded within this reporting.

Theoretical framework: Media and the contestation of legitimacy

Typically, political scientists model a political transformation in stages – a stage of liberalization, followed by the transition itself, and a stage of consolidation in which the new regime type works according to the newly established rules (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986). The stage before a regime actually collapses or is transformed is particularly interesting because it acts as a sort of black box processing what exactly leads up to the transformation (Albrecht and Schlumberger, 2004). In an attempt to summarize typical causes for regime breakdowns, Merkel (2010: 98–101) distinguishes between external and internal causes. While external causes are, for example, defeat in war or regional domino effects, internal causes are more complex – but can be summarized as crises of legitimacy of the incumbent regimes (Merkel, 2010: 98–99). Merkel lists crises of economic insufficiency as major causes of regime changes. In addition, crises can occur due to regimes’ failures to sustain political legitimacy, and these failures often become crises through key events (Merkel, 2010: 98–99).

Competing concepts of what is considered legitimate are leading to contested and ever-changing interpretations of political events in society (Klein, 2016). These struggles over legitimacy can be amplified by the media. Mass media systems are specialized structures for observing their surrounding systems in society and establishing the respective social discourses (Luhmann, 2000). In different political systems, mass media organizations are granted more or less autonomy from political control (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). However, even if authoritarian regimes formally control the mass media, these systems are vulnerable to deviant public discourses about politically taboo but societally crucial issues because of existing alternative or transnational public realms that they cannot (fully) control. Media can thus provide a resonance space for contesting interpretations of the legitimacy of authorities (Rucht, 1994). Thus, we argue that legitimacy is subject to what we call discursive contestation, and media are those organizational structures through which such a discursive contestation can materialize.

However, not every legitimacy crisis will ultimately make it into the media, particularly not in strongly controlled media systems. For media exposure to happen, there needs firstly to be a crisis topic that affects a relevant number of people either economically or emotionally, and secondly, a newsworthy event must occur in order for reporting to take place. Relying on the reinterpretation of Dayan and Katz’s conceptualization of media events by Bulut and Can (2019: 151), we assume that events that ‘disrupt the routine flow of life and media programming’ can be the door-openers for contesting issues to be publicly discussed in the mass media.

Against this background and before delving into the actual analysis of two cases of contestation in two different media and political systems, we will, in the following section, provide specific contextual information to explain why a comparison of the two cases across space and time is reasonable. We will first describe the regimes’ status quo that led to a similar situation of political crisis in Poland in 1984 and Egypt in 2010. Then, we will explain the specific characteristics of the two media systems, showing the levels of control and autonomy in both cases. This will lead up to a description of the two cases that had similarly the potential to become contesting issues and the media events that made them newsworthy.

The cases and their contexts: On legitimacy crises, media systems and contesting issues

We compared two cases identified in the literature that became contesting issues that fundamentally challenged the governments’ authority in Poland before the systemic change in 1989 and Egypt before 2011. These cases evolved around two events that happened during a period of ostensibly strong authoritarian ruling on the one hand, but dissolving legitimacy on the other hand. In Poland, the murder of Jerzy Popiełuszko was definitely one of the most prominent cases in terms of its relevance, the quantity of reporting and the national and international attention (Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 39–40). In Egypt, the case of the killing of Khaled Said is said to have stirred the protests on Police Day on 25 January 2011, which finally led to the resignation of long-term ruler Husni Mubarak (Khamis and Vaughn, 2011).

Authorities in legitimacy crises

In Poland, on the surface, the government’s authority seemed to be firm, but was in fact facing ever-growing economic problems in the state-directed economy (Goldman, 1997). The ruling communist Polish United Workers Party had already been fragmenting along political currents (Poznanski, 1996: 66–67). As a reaction to the rapidly organizing trade union Solidarność (Laba, 1991), in December 1980, the newly installed General of the Army, Wojciech Jaruzelski, and the Military Council of National Salvation banned Solidarność, crushed the movement along with all its associated political structures, arrested hundreds of oppositional activists and imposed martial law, which lasted until 22 July 1983. Thereafter, thousands of employees had to sign loyalty declarations, and any sort of gathering or publication was even more strictly controlled than before (Pszenicki, 1983). The opposition was greatly discouraged, but not dissolved completely. Those withstanding actors that still engaged in activities of civil society could rely on societal and international support during this time of repression. Moreover, the Catholic Church traditionally had a strong position that did not allow the government to ban its organizations. Thus, some parishes of the Catholic Church became the last legal refuges for activists and hubs for support from international organizations (Bloom, 2013). The upper clergy manoeuvred between condemnation of the repressive measures, cooperation in order to maintain influence, and public appeal for the avoidance of unrest and violence (Hanson, 1987: 200; Ramet, 2017: 175). Jozéf Glemp, Cardinal of the Catholic Church, was repeatedly requested to curb ‘extremist priests’ who were openly criticizing human rights abuses (Ramet, 1991: 188). From abroad, Karol Wojtyła, who was appointed Pope John Paul II in 1978, effectively fostered the authority of the Polish Catholic Church (Hanson, 1987).

In Egypt, the period before Khaled Said’s killing was marked by general public dissatisfaction and the desire for political change. The presidential elections planned in 2011 led to intensive debates on Egypt’s future. Lack of clarity on president Husni Mubarak’s successor and his son’s quick rise in the ruling party fuelled outrage at the idea that he might have been groomed to take over (Schäfer, 2009). At the same time, the ‘authoritarian bargain’ whereby Egyptians traditionally exchanged their political quiescence for social goods and services from the state slowly eroded due to the expanding neoliberal policies (Ismail, 2012: 437). Back then, the regime tolerated youth activism, both as a means of legitimating itself and diverting frustration towards foreign policy issues, but these same oppositional networks increasingly shifted their focus to domestic issues. After 2005, the oppositional Muslim Brotherhood bloc in parliament also conducted a margin of legitimate political action. In 2010, the return of Mohamed ElBaradei, Egyptian Nobel Laureate and former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, strengthened the alliance of diverse political actors under the umbrella of the National Association for Change, which demanded an end to Mubarak’s rule (Schäfer, 2009). The alliance demanded political reforms labelled ‘the seven demands’, among which was the end of emergency law. Amid this tense political climate, Khaled Said’s murder sparked protests to demand justice and democratic rule.

Media systems towards autonomy

Both media systems in our sample were dominated by controlled mass media, but not fully. There were several alternative spaces for critical articulation that functioned in contrast to the government-controlled media’s coverage.

Generally, the Polish media system was modelled according to the Soviet media system and subject to the Communist Party doctrine. Journalism was meant not to report mere facts, but the ‘truth’ behind those facts as interpreted by the nomenclature (Goban-Klas, 1997). Broadcasting media in Poland consisted of two national TV and four radio programmes that were heavily controlled. Censorship of print media was tighter or looser depending on the quantity and quality of the respective readership and social classes the outlet targeted (Delhaes, 1997). In the communist systems of the Soviet type, criticism and self-criticism were institutionalized, but had to be carried out ‘constructively’, without a legal protection for deviant voices (Mommsen, 1989). Reporting on certain conflicting issues like among others the Polish history from 1939 onwards or environmental threats were generally strictly prohibited (Aumente, 1999: 44). Although Polish mass media were institutionally integrated into the political system and the editorial offices were, accordingly, subject to processes of alignment (Pszenicki, 1983), Polish journalists, ‘like Western journalists, … have developed the overriding professional identity’ (Curry, 1990: 23). Within the political doctrine, they were normatively institutionalized as ombudsmen of the people. In addition, Poland was the only country within the states pertaining to the Warsaw Pact that allowed mass media production outside of the party-controlled media system by some Catholic organizations. These were organized independently from the state, but also subject to censorship. Due to the strength of the Catholic Church, Catholic publishing enjoyed a certain leeway and the newspaper Tygodnik Poszechny enjoyed recognition within and outside of Poland (Delhaes, 1997).

In Egypt, the media landscape in the 2000s was semi-liberalized, allowing an – albeit controlled – pluralism. Aside from the dozen state-owned broadcasting channels and party-owned print media, the regime tolerated limited pockets of free expression as a survival tactic to appease its Western allies and attract foreign investments. The economic liberalization of audio-visual media in 2001 and print media in 2003 produced semi-independent private media that were actually meant to follow a regime-loyalist agenda: licenses were granted to a selected handful of loyalist business tycoons (Roll, 2013). However, when the first private daily newspaper, Al-Masry Al-Youm, was launched in 2004, a new spirit started to permeate the market. Pursuing a ‘professional logic’ (Kassem, 2017), it constituted a licensed forum that added legitimate controversies and alternative interpretations to the political reality. Private media used Western-oriented journalism practices and diverse sources to add credibility and to secure readership and viewership (Sakr, 2013). As the political parties were weak, co-opted and conflicted, the private media substituted them for vocalizing grievances and demands. At the same time, the spread of blogs and social media since the mid-2000s started to constitute a new online public sphere to express oppositional views beyond the mainstream media (Abdulla, 2011). According to ITU figures,¹ however, only about a fifth of the Egyptian population had access to the internet in 2010, and only five percent were on Facebook. This still helped tremendously to build issue-specific networks and coalitions among the youth and activists (Howard and Hussain, 2013), yet social media still had to be considered a niche medium that unfolded its contesting potential first and foremost in relation to other media such as TV and print in what Chadwick (2013) calls a ‘hybrid media system’.

Unfolding contesting issues

Within these political and media structures, specific topics were likely to stir popular grievances, and thus could serve as contesting issues to be pushed forward in the media.

In Poland, certainly, after the crackdown on Solidarność not only topics of labor policy were suppressed but also the drastic measures taken by the military council to silence unrest. Actors, that would not bow down to pressure were priests from the lower clergy within the Catholic Church, particularly the parish of Jerzy Popiełuszko, St.-Stanisław-Kostka in Żoliborz. Delegated earlier for pastoral care to Northern Warsaw, Popiełuszko had started to hold monthly ‘Masses for the Homeland’ in 1982 that were soon attracting audiences of around 10,000 people, overcrowding the church and broadcasted via loudspeakers in the streets (Meyer, 1985). From April 1982 onwards, Jerzy Popiełuszko was under close surveillance of the Polish secret service. On 2 December 1983, the Warsaw Police ordered him in for interrogation. During his arrest from 12 December on the secret service deposited arms, explosives and rally leaflets in Popiełuszko’s flat that they later ‘discovered’. He became free from imprisonment upon public pressure and after the intervention of Bishop Bronisław Dąbrowski. The setup served as a reason for Popiełuszko’s prosecution in July 1984, in addition to the charges of abusing freedom of faith in his Masses for the Homeland. He came free after an amnesty for political prisoners. Nonetheless, Popiełuszko did not change his way of performing his priestly office (Kindziuk, 2014). In October 1984, Popiełuszko was abducted, beaten to death and drowned in a water reservoir by members of the secret service, but unfortunately for the authorities, a witness was left behind who testified against persons unknown. This made Popiełuszko a martyr, and the incident of his murder forced the issue of police brutality into the official public realm.

In Egypt, struggles for dignity were the topics a broad range of people could connect to. The feeling of not being treated as citizens but rather subordinates by the regime and its institutions was best exemplified in cases of police torture. Indeed, pressure groups, including the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights that monitored and documented regime violations, had already paved a way for raising attention to this topic. Moreover, there were bloggers who broke the silence on police torture by publishing audio-visual proof. In 2007, Wael Abbas’ Misr Digital blog leaked the video of Emad Al-Kabir, a tortured bus driver. This stirred up strong criticism, and pushed the Egyptian authorities to put the responsible police officers on trial for unlawful detention, torture and rape, a rare public display of accountability at that time (Azimi, 2007: 11). In 2010, the April 6 Youth Movement mobilized small protests on Police Day. Gradually, professional journalists at private media organizations openly published on police abuses. Newspapers and talk shows picked up the stories and added salience to the issue (Hamdy, 2009). These years were crucial for raising awareness and building networks around the regime-contesting issue of police torture.

This legacy helps us understand the case of Khaled Said, who became a victim of police torture while simply sitting in an Internet café in Alexandria. On 6 June 2010, two plainclothes officers dragged him out of the café into a neighbouring house and beat him to death in front of countless witnesses (Al-Nadeem Center, 2010). The initial coroner’s report issued the cause of death as asphyxiation due to swallowing a marijuana packet, without stating anything about signs of the brutal torture. However, growing pressure from Khaled Said’s family and human rights activists who pushed for a reexamination to prove the torture and Khaled Said’s innocence regarding substance abuse forced the authorities to react. Civil society actors forged a collective identity as victims of brutal injustice (Al-Amrani, 2011). Organized protest waves in June and July 2010 resulted in wider demands for justice, regime accountability and an end to the emergency law. Eventually, the prosecutor general ordered the reexamination of Khaled Said’s body as well as the arrest of the two officers to put them on trial.

Despite differences in details and their embeddedness in different historical times and geographical spaces, both cases can be considered reasonable cases for comparison. They reflect authoritarian governments in a legitimacy crisis due to economic and political failures that made these governments susceptible to being seriously contested by sensitive issues. In both cases, the description of the political circumstances reveals that despite attempts of repression, strong networks of contesters had been built that could not be neglected by the state authorities. In addition, the structures of both media systems sometimes allowed journalists to push the red lines of censorship – mainly due to concessions made in an attempt to foster ideological self-criticism or alleged professionalism. Moreover, people had increasingly access to niche media that allowed an alternative perspective. In Egypt, blogging but also social media was on the rise and offered information beyond the state’s control, but also in Poland foreign broadcasting was available as an alternative source of information. Thus, the public was increasingly sensitized, particularly to topics related to dignity that questioned the moral legitimacy of the ruling elites, making it a pressing issue for them to deal with.

Methodology

The analysis consists of two case studies that reconstruct the media coverage of the case of Jerzy Popiełuszko in Poland and Khaled Said in Egypt through a content analysis. The aim was (1) to track how each case became an issue in the mass media, i.e., which medium picked the issue up first and for what reason, (2) how the issue cycle evolved, i.e., which medium covered the issue how intensely over time and (3) which interpretations of the events were featured in the respective coverage, i.e., what kind of contesting narratives were brought up and which semantics were used. By connecting the findings of the content analysis to secondary sources – in the Egyptian case, including some interviews with specific media and oppositional actors involved – it can be shown how media helped to delegitimize regime politics.

In the Polish case, we included in the content analysis all articles mentioning Jerzy Popiełuszko from 14 December 1983, after he was detained and the secret service searched his flat in Warsaw, until 15 March 1985, roughly one month after the trial against his murderers ended. We analysed (1) the daily Trybuna Ludu, which had the highest circulation in Poland and the closest links to the Central Committee; (2) the weekly Polityka, a highbrow newspaper that was established in 1957 for addressing the intellectual elite (Curry, 1981); (3) the Tygodnik Powszechny, a Catholic weekly magazine that was published by the Cracow Episcopacy under the editor and Catholic lay intellectual Jerzy Turowicz (de Lacy, 1986). This added up to 181 articles.

In the Egyptian case, all articles or posts that mentioned Khaled Said from 6 June 2010, the day of his murder, to 25 January 2011, the day revolutionary uprisings started in Egypt, were included. This added up to 316 items. The selected media consisted of (1) the daily Al-Ahram, Egypt’s oldest serious newspaper that represents the official state line; (2) the privately owned daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, which was founded in 2004; and (3) the Facebook page We are all Khaled Said, which was founded in solidarity with Khaled Said after he was killed. Due to the non-digitized archives of the newspapers, the material was selected by browsing through the sample manually and selecting all articles that mentioned the victims.

In both cases, the samples include three differently organized types of media. Because the level of liberalization in the media sector varied in the two countries and technological development allowed in the Egyptian case a new space to emerge – social media – the selection of the respective three media was made regarding its specific position in the system and its political function. For each country, one newspaper was chosen that represents the tight control of the state and therefore the mainstream discourses that the regimes hoped to invoke in society. Secondly, a newspaper was picked that represented the broadest possible freedom within the official realm, i.e., a formally licensed intellectual paper in Poland and one of the few licensed privately owned newspapers in Egypt. We expected them to apply different journalistic routines to contesting issues. Finally, a so-called alternative media outlet was chosen in each country that had the resources to remain beyond state control and had a strong connection to the contesting issue. In the Polish case, we opted for a newspaper belonging to the rather autonomous Catholic church, in the Egyptian case we chose a Facebook page that was set up specifically for commemorating Khaled Said. We treated each medium as an output platform for manifest content only, meaning that with regard to the Facebook page only posts or re-posts of the administrator were analysed, but no shares, likes or a further analysis of network components were included. Thus, we could not detect the full potential of the Facebook page regarding mobilization in social media, but we extracted the ‘authorized’ content for a comparative analysis.

In each case study, both a descriptive quantitative and an in-depth qualitative content analyses were used. The quantitative data, including date of publication, length and positioning of articles, sources used as well as authorship, were used mainly to trace the cycle of reporting over time. The qualitative content analysis aimed at detecting the contesting lines of argumentation including the semantics used. Initially, around 10% of the material was read closely and the main arguments of the media involved were worked out inductively and grouped into categories following guidelines from Mayring (2016). These categories included: (a) description of the contested event, (b) involved actors and their labelling (victim, state actors, police officers, etc.), (c) regime characterization, (d) consequences for the regimes. In a second step, these categories were used as a coding scheme to work through the whole material, allocating suitable paragraphs and sentences from the media items to them. During this process the categories were refined and further abstracted in multiple analysis cycles. In a third step, we abstracted the arguments into three broad categories to establish comparison criteria across the two cases. These final categories structure the findings as follows: (1) the characterization of the victim, (2) the question of responsibility and (3) state deference and authorities’ actions.

Results: Breakthrough, issue cycles and contesting interpretations

The breakthrough of the issue into mass media

In the Polish case, the contesting issue of police brutality was triggered by the abduction and murder of Jerzy Popiełuszko in October 1984. At this point, Popiełuszko had already become a public figure. This amplified the relevance of the crime, which therefore had to be recognized publicly by the authorities. Before the actual murder, Popiełuszko had been subjected to a criminal setup and a smear campaign, which was initiated by the spokesperson of the government, Jerzy Urban. Thus, Trybuna Ludu first mentioned Popiełuszko on 14 December 1983 – long before his murder – referring to a news report from the Polish news agency Polska Agencja Prasowa (PAP) from one of the regular press conferences of Jerzy Urban, who informed about the discovering of incriminating material in Popiełuszko’s flat. On Christmas Eve, as part of the smear campaign, Urban himself published a juicy article in the Wieczorny Express under a pseudonym (Michał Ostrowski) containing very detailed information about Popiełuszko’s flat and possibly secret love nest as well as place for illegal activities, which Trybuna Ludu republished obligingly.

Table 1.

Sample for content analysis. Source: authors' compilation

	Poland	N	Egypt	N
Official State/Party media	Trybuna Ludu	100	Al-Ahram	57
Semi-independent yet licensed media	Polityka	30	Al-Masry Al-Youm	194
Alternative media	Tygodnik Powszechny	51	We are all Khaled Said	65
		181		316

Figure 1.

Media coverage of Jerzy Popiełuszko, September 1984–February 1985 (articles/pages per month).

Figure 2.

Media coverage of Khaled Said, June 2010–February 2011 (articles per month).

In June 1984, after a pause of several months, a newswire from the PAP brought Popiełuszko to public attention again. Trybuna Ludu and Polityka both published a short information piece stating that the Polish Episcopacy declared on request that Popiełuszko’s statement in foreign media of supporting the boycott of the upcoming elections of Polish National Councils would not be the official position of the Polish Church. Furthermore, Popiełuszko was covered in Trybuna Ludu and Polityka in July, when the case of anti-state activities and sabotage that he was accused of in December 1983 was brought to trial. In addition, the newspapers reported that the newly enacted amnesty law would possibly lead to the impunity of Popiełuszko. At last, on 13 September 1984, in a review of foreign press coverage on Poland, Trybuna Ludu informed readers about an article from the correspondent of the Soviet Isvestija questioning the officially propagated good relations between the government and the Church in Poland. The Soviet newspaper criticised that obviously the Polish government would tolerate hostile anti-government activities of some priests from the lower clergy, which also would not be possible without the Church’s connivance.

In the Egyptian case, Khaled Said was not a famous figure like Popiełuszko was when he was killed, but it was a group of famous oppositional figures and human rights activists who made his case public. Among them was the former presidential candidate and politician Ayman Nour. He was among the first to publish Khaled Said’s gruesome picture on his Facebook account on 10 June 2010 to highlight the regime’s injustice. This action made the case available to a larger public audience in the growing sphere of social media. Wael Ghonim, a Google employee then located in the Gulf states, founded the page We are all Khaled Said after reading about the young victim for the first time on Nour’s Facebook account in an attempt ‘to market the public sympathy for the victim, using the positive affect for the martyr and his grieving mother’ (Ghonim, 2012: 84). On 10 June 2010, the Facebook page published two posts about Khaled Said. Through other social media platforms and blogs, the story began to circulate on the Internet. This pressured the state news agency MENA to publish a news piece about the incident, but only on 11 June 2010, with a delay of 5 days after the killing. The state-owned Al-Ahram and the private newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm took up the story directly on the next day, 12 June 2010. For the private newspapers, it was ‘initial confusion over the contradicting details of the incident [that] caused the delay in the media coverage, as well as Khaled Said’s family’s reluctance to share the story with the media’, explained Mohamed Fouad, an Alexandrian journalist (Fouad, 2017).

In contrast to Khaled Said, Jerzy Popiełuszko was already well known before he became a victim of the security forces’ brutality – even if it was through a smear campaign to discredit a disturbing figure. This fact intensified the pressure on the authorities to make sure that the crime was reported and followed up on. In the Egyptian case, the brutality itself had already made it into parts of the mass media, thus making the incident with Khaled Said an emblematic case to dig into deeper. Yet, in both cases, the public breakthrough of the issue was amplified by the attention political figures paid to the victims (albeit in the case of Popiełuszko, the final story was not what Jerzy Urban had intended). Thus, the specific incidents of the murders could not be neglected by the authorities, who had to accept media coverage of the follow-ups which eventually created a contesting issue to the regimes; this will be shown in the following sections.

Media coverage of the issue over the course of time (issue cycle)

In the Polish case, Popiełuszko’s abduction was first revealed in Trybuna Ludu on 19 October 1984, after which the newspaper reported on it continuously and nearly every day. The government interpreted the murder as a political provocation against their so-called ‘normalization’ policy ordered by unidentified hardliners. In a transcription (29 October 1984) of the Minister of the Interior Czesław Kiszczak’s televised speech on the occasion of Popiełuszko’s abduction, he claimed that Poland would not be a ‘jungle of lawlessness’, underlining righteous efforts of the authorities to solve the crime, and promised utmost transparency. This led up to a public trial that would have been unlikely in other circumstances. Furthermore, because selected national and international journalists as well as representatives of foreign NGOs were allowed to attend the trial and report on the case, original information could be independently gathered and circulated abroad as well as in the underground media (Lammich, 1985).

Starting from the abduction of the priest until the end of the trial against Popiełuszko’s murderers in February 1985, Trybuna Ludu published a vast amount of detailed information. These articles were mostly reprints from the PAP about the funeral, new insights from the police’s investigations as well as the government’s statements and measures concerning the case. The weekly Polityka reported in its more analytical style, less frequent and detailed in quantity but high in quality. This included comments from prominent staff writers, which took over the party line that the incident would be a political provocation, nevertheless pressed for a meticulous clarification of facts because of the damage this case meant for the authorities (3 and 10 November 1984). Besides regularly informing the public with news briefs, the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny mainly published statements by the Polish Catholic clergy, two scripts from audiences of the Pope and one from the funeral mass in Poland as well as one interview which Popiełuszko gave to the BBC shortly before his death. There are three journalistic articles – one from a staff writer and two from guest authors – and atmospheric reportages about the funeral and celebrations of All Saint’s Day commemorating Popiełuszko in Katowice, in which the authors expressed their and Polish Catholics’ grief (11 November 1984). These articles also included notes about some of their parts being censored. Tygodnik Powszechny covered the Popiełuszko case in a very different, less journalistic but more chronicling way, and never took on the government’s interpretation of the crime.

With regard to Khaled Said’s case in Egypt, the privately owned daily Al-Masry Al-Youm clearly dominated the media coverage (194 articles) while the state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram only published about a quarter of this amount, despite its institutional capacity and resources. On the other hand, the oppositional Facebook page We are all Khaled Said published 65 posts, although it was effectively a one-man endeavour.

Mass media coverage started as a casual story in the crime section, but soon shifted into the political section, becoming a top story within the month and even making it to the front page of Al-Masry Al-Youm numerous times (19 and 29 June 2010; 1 July 2010). Once the trial of the police officers began on 31 July 2010, the amount of coverage of the specific case dropped sharply, mainly being represented by brief coverage of the court proceedings and trial rescheduling on a monthly basis. However, the case had stimulated attention to the issue of police brutality itself, so whenever new police torture cases were revealed, they received attention, particularly in the privately owned newspaper. This was spurred by the oppositional anti-torture networks that had obviously adapted to the new media logic in Egypt. Firstly, they staged routinized protest events in key places of attention, such as Alexandria and Cairo. Secondly, civil society actors published statements by key figures, press releases and set up press conferences in order to generate newsworthiness. State media largely ignored the protests related to Khaled Said’s case. Only a few Al-Ahram columnists discredited the opposition, arguing it ‘abused the dead for political gain. However, chaos and destabilization should not intimidate the course of legal procedures’ (10 June 2010). Once the court proceedings started, Al-Ahram ceased to raise the issue, with the argument that media should not interfere with justice. Only Al-Masry Al-Youm systematically covered both the civil society statements and the protest events as well as the state responses. Thus, it became the platform for presenting different arguments and interpretations, allowing the issue to become contentious through public circulation. This became most obvious during the period surrounding Police Day on 25 January 2011, when mass protests were legitimized by protesters referring to the case of Khaled Said, which was reflected in the coverage of the news media. This gave him the standing of a posthumous icon of the revolution.

Both cases differed significantly in their issue cycles due to different systemic logics guiding media production, but also due to the different governments’ strategies for containing the issue. In Poland, transparent coverage of the abuse of power by authorities was publicly promised by the Ministry of the Interior and performed by the state-owned news agency, whereas in Egypt, the government tried to suppress the breakthrough of the issue. In Poland, the Communist Party’s main strategy was to not be accused of covering up the issue and it promised utmost transparency. The official media’s coverage helped to reveal ugly details about the authorities’ measures in the official public realm. Even if that strategy at first kept up the appearance of due process, it opened the door for more critiques on the international front. In Egypt, in a typical move, the authorities tried to cover up the issue, but due to the existence of social and private media that reported extensively as well as civil society protests, the official media were forced to report on the issue, too. The official media’s coverage remained rather low, trying to downplay the issue. However, because of continuous reporting of new developments in Khaled Said’s and other cases in the context of police brutality, the expected containment through downplaying did not work out either. Both strategies led to a set of similar contesting interpretations in the media that ultimately delegitimized the authorities in both countries and will be discussed in the following section.

Contesting interpretations

In Poland, already the characterization of the victim differed between the analysed media. Initially, the Communist Party’s newspaper Trybuna Ludu primed the public by presenting Popiełuszko as an amoral hate-preacher. In this phase before the abduction, the newspaper fully adopted the government’s perspective, as it published the government’s spokesperson Urban’s accusations against Popiełuszko. Moreover, when Popiełuszko voiced his opinion in an interview with foreign media in June 1984, expressing his support of members of Solidarność calling for a boycott of local elections in Poland, Trybuna Ludu – and also Polityka – reported on the Episcopacy’s statement that this would not be an official position of the Church (16 June 1984). Thus, Popiełuszko was exhibited as a subversive political activist. In the course of the events, the accusations diminished in the reporting of Popiełuszko’s abduction and murder in Trybuna Ludu, although they were repeated again when citing from the trial proceedings as well as in comments by the editor-in-chief. The editor-in-chief took over the argument from the trial in his final comments in Trybuna Ludu (2, 3 and 11 February 1985), blaming Popiełuszko for ‘extremism’ that had caused ‘extremism’ of the culprits, and therewith referred to the communist semantic framing of religion as a counter-revolutionary force subversive to communist systems.

Neither Polytika nor Tygodnik Powszechny adopted this characterization of the victim, but in their coverage built up public pressure on the government for clearing up the crime and restoring its legitimacy. Tygodnik Powszechny was acting in its own right as a newspaper published by the Catholic Church that was quite independent. It never raised doubts about Popiełuszko’s integrity; on the contrary, it showed its explicit bias towards Popiełusko when reporting on his abduction and murder, as well as framing the autopsy and the funeral through emotional words accompanied by a large picture showing Popiełuszko among a huge crowd of believers (11 November 1984). By keeping silent and not actively countering the accusations, it took the role of representing the silent majority that would not get caught in Urban’s trap of ambiguity towards Popiełuszko.

In addition, the question of responsibility arose. Once suspects were arrested shortly after the abduction, the governmental communication emphasized the individual guilt of the culprits. On 29 October 1984, Trybuna Ludu published a transcript of a public speech by the Minister of the Interior, Czesław Kiszczak, in which he revealed the full names of the three culprits, members of the secret service and, thus, staff members of his ministry. He called on the public not to generalize the personal misconduct of the single culprits as systemic failure. Kiszczak also used the incident to underline the righteousness of the previous purges within its own ranks and files by the current government during martial law. He mentioned that one culprit had revealed his motive as being dissatisfied with the insufficient legal measures against Popiełuszko’s activities. During the trial proceedings, the culprits were presented in court as miserable and demoralized but loyal personnel who were afflicted by the current hard times for staunch communists. The state’s crisis would have motivated their breach of law and taking matters into their own hands. The PAP and Trybuna Ludu, which mainly published articles from the PAP, adopted this interpretation.

In contrast, Polityka did not pay much attention to the traits of the culprits before the trial. Thereafter, the cross-examinations of the four defendants and witness accounts were covered in detail, including contradictions or irregularities, for example, when one culprit withdraw his testimony that he acted upon an order from above (12 January 1985). Tygodnik Powszechny completely ignored the culprits besides giving news briefs on their arrests and accusations. In the protocols from the trial, the descriptions of the culprits and their testimonies were published without comments (the accreditation for its correspondent Wanda Falkowska was withdrawn so that Tygodnik Powszechny relied only on their sources among the foreign trial correspondents, see Bradley, 1985).

The Polish government’s communication followed the scheme of Leninist semantic framing (Demaitre, 1966) and refusal of international intervention by praising the authorities’ efficiency concerning the investigations and the transparency of the trial with the final conviction of the perpetrators as well as the government’s success at obtaining public order and preventing the partition of the Polish population. Trybuna Ludu adapted this interpretation in the 14 press reviews of foreign media it published on the case, as well as the official interpretation of the crime as a ‘political provocation’ set out to destroy the Jaruzelski government’s improving relationships with foreign countries and the Catholic Church in the so-called ‘normalization’ process. However, even if the Trybuna Ludu duly published the official newswires from the PAP and comments supportive of the government, the meticulous reporting of all details in the published newswires and articles amplified the contesting of the authorities’ legitimate action and state deference.

The coverage in Polityka did not contradict the official party line, but we found interesting formulations emphasizing that the case would afflict the integration of Polish society, and that without the greatest efforts towards solving the case, the government would jeopardize its authority (3 and 11 November 1984). Polityka even called the cumbersome and lengthy procedures of the trial ‘a theatre’ (26 January 1985). The trial reporting was accompanied by criticisms of protraction (22 December 1984) and observations of the public reception of the events, for example, when people handed over an open letter criticizing the belated publication of the results of Popiełuszko’s autopsy (26 January 1985).

The Tygodnik Powszechny published a full protocol of the trial. In the reporting, no counterarguments were raised, and the newspaper stayed away from a fight about ambiguous communist terminology, thus underlining the true meaning of human rights, ignoring the language that was forced upon the Polish public.

In Egypt, the line of argumentation was surprisingly similar to the Polish case despite the different emphasis and issue cycle in the media. Media coverage first also evolved around two opposing characterizations of the victim, albeit more directly articulated than in the Polish case. For example, according to an NGO for rehabilitation of torture victims, Khaled Said was an innocent, law-abiding citizen who had become a ‘martyr of the emergency law’ (Al-Nadeem Center, 2010). On the other hand, the Ministry of the Interior dismissed Khaled Said as a criminal drug addict who died due to asphyxiation over a marijuana packet as he tried to hide it during a routine security inspection. While the state-owned media reflected the state institutions’ interpretation (Al-Ahram even sarcastically called him ‘the martyr of marijuana’ (10 June 2010)), the social media page We are all Khaled Said became the mouthpiece of the activists. It was the private daily Al-Masry Al-Youm that had a bridging function between the two opposing sides – at the same time, the conflicting interpretations made the story newsworthy for this newspaper. State media questioned Khaled Said’s military service (Al-Ahram, 10 June 2010) and denied his torture, as the police officers only wanted to keep law and order. In response, the Facebook page We are all Khaled Said labelled the regime as ‘liars and brutal’ (12 June 2010).

Like in the Polish case, the defamation of the individual victim diminished after a while. Instead, individual responsibility of the culprits was highlighted. Thus, the media’s discourse shifted after the general prosecutor opened an investigation. State-owned media started to accept the possibility of the police officers’ violence, and acknowledged that they ‘violently manhandled Khaled Said’ (Al-Ahram, 10 July 2010). At some point, Al-Ahram criticized the mismanagement of the Ministry of the Interior and asked: ‘if some low-ranked officers committed a mistake, why would the state institutions jeopardize their credibility to cover up for them? Let them go on trial’ (10 July 2010). Just like in the Polish case, the authorities wanted to scapegoat individuals for a systemic failure. Consequently, state media never acknowledged torture as a systemic problem. However, after initially refusing any guilt, it reluctantly accepted the officers’ mistake and considered narrow and individual consequences. Al-Ahram urged the public to await the investigations and to trust the judiciary, as it was believed that the rule of law would prevail. It further praised the professional and functioning security system as well as the police sacrifices to protect the country.

State deference and authorities’ legitimacy were important cornerstones of argumentation – similarly to the Polish case. Al-Ahram portrayed the general prosecutor’s decision to reexamine Khaled Said’s body as proof of the credibility of state institutions. Differently to the Polish case, however, where criticism in the media was articulated much more subtly, a fierce media battle about the prerogatives of interpretation of the consequences of the killing arose. In social media, the politicization of Khaled Said’s death increased, as his killing was interpreted as torture inflicted by an unjust, repressive regime. Social media participants called for protests deriving from patriotism and the demand for dignity (We are all Khaled Said, 2 July 2010). On the other hand, state media source Al-Ahram tried to depoliticize Khaled Said’s case.

Contrary to the Polish case in which, due to stricter control, only foreign news media could analyse the reported facts more independently, there was the privately owned, semi-independent Al-Masry Al-Youm, which took advantage of the freedom to not take sides, instead functioning as an investigative medium. Nevertheless, it obviously processed the arguments made via social media platforms, albeit with a less subversive attitude. It offered regulative solutions, such as demanding the ‘immediate end of emergency law’ as well as the reform and rehabilitation of police personnel (10 June 2010). The newspaper maintained the necessity of an immediate change of the political system, thus echoing the youth and oppositional movements which demanded a democratic transformation.

Conclusion

In our contribution, we aimed to show how, in a legitimacy crisis of authoritarian regimes, media helped to pave the way for a transformation of the political system by providing a resonance space for contesting issues that amplified the crisis. In both Poland during the mid-1980s and Egypt at the end of the 2010s, not only had the ruling regimes’ economic basis eroded, but strong crises of moral legitimacy also unfolded. Against the background of differing media systems, we examined two events that triggered strong media attention and ultimately questioned regime legitimacy.

The results showed that in both cases, the officially controlled mass media covered the issue because of the enormous newsworthiness a murder committed by governmental authorities created. Both cases, however, differ with regard to the issue cycles due to different government strategies to contain the issue and the functions attributed to the media systems. While the Polish party-controlled newspapers profited from decreed transparency that the government promised to regain legitimacy, the Egyptian authorities tried to cover up the incident and suppress the reporting about it. Trybuna Ludu reproduced the interpretation of the Polish authorities, albeit revealing the crime committed by secret service officers and the flaws of both the investigation and the trial in detail. Polityka showed even more freedom in interpreting the case. In addition, selected international journalists and some representatives of foreign NGOs could attend and report on the trial, and thus circulated information that also found its way back to the Polish public, in particular via the Tygodnik Powszechny. In Egypt, the neglect of the incident was undermined by a freer media scene, including privately owned newspapers such as Al-Masry Al-Youm that strived for investigative reporting, and the growth of social media that helped to circumvent authoritarian gatekeeping. Social media did not cause, but accelerated information diffusion and salience transfer.

With regard to the contesting interpretations of the issue, however, we found strong similarities between the two cases. While the regimes’ media tried to defame the victims, referring to unpatriotic and illegal behaviour, the more independent media countered this by highlighting the integrity of the victims. This was done very openly. The media closest to the regimes focused strongly on the argument of the rule of law and stability being guaranteed only by the existing authorities, whereas less controlled media called for due evidence of legitimacy in accordance with the rule of law. Again, in the Polish case, this was done less explicitly by Polityka in comments and by calling the trial ‘a theatre’, or in the Tygodnik Powszechny by avoiding getting involved in communist dialectics. In Egypt, on the other hand, discourse in social media strongly countered the regime’s media, and due to this conflictual setting, both arguments found a resonance space in the private Al-Masry Al-Youm.

As we can see in the analysed cases, the respective mass media platforms of the countries under investigation were involved in revealing fundamentally illegitimate flaws of the ruling authoritarian regimes, introducing a considerable share of delegitimizing information into the public realm and challenging the discursive hegemony of the authoritarian regimes, thus fuelling transformation.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received financial support from the DFG (German Research Foundation) for the research, authorship and publication of this article.

Note

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