ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors argue that changes in Polish society and politics, alongside those related to media freedom, call for a re-examination of journalism and the role of media accountability. They also argue that existing theoretical concepts highlighting the interplay between politics and media, such as political parallelism, media instrumentalisation and external pluralism, might have become inadequate to fully reflect on the Polish case. Challenges related to media accountability form the basis of the case study of Poland, one of the biggest countries representing central and eastern European media cultures. In political science, the term has been mostly used to highlight polarisation in the public sphere and the divergence of political attitudes to ideological extremes. The authors aim to build a multilevel analytical prism, which highlights two basic levels of polarisation processes: the structural and behavioural. They show that the state-of-the-art of Polish journalism calls for advanced concepts and frameworks to fully understand media-political relations.
