ABSTRACT
The most important aspect of the new public was its ignorance. It did not possess the quantity of information about the history of the society nor about the contemporary range of urgent issues which would have enabled the politician to speak to it on terms of greater equality. One of the political changes which took place in Poland in the wake of the riots in Gdansk and the arrival in power of Edward Gierek was a decision to use television to communicate information about the far-reaching series of political changes directly to the people over the heads of the middle-rank party officials and party organs. The course of the protracted efforts of politicians and broadcasters to come to terms with their new relationship is simultaneously the history of the development of television as a means of government. Television may be on the way to turning into a new kind of political forum.
