Resumen de Courts, Constitutionality and Conflicts in Media Representations: A Case Study in Polish Rule of Law Crisis
Stanislaw W. Gozdz-Roszkowski, Monika Kopytowska
Ever since its landslide victory in the 2015 general election, Poland’s right wing ruling party Law and Justice (PiS) has been pushing with its plan to overhaul the Polish judicial system. At the heart of the proposed judical reform have been changes affecting the workings of two most important judcial bodies: the Constitutional Court (pol. Trybunał Konstytucyjny) and the Supreme Court. The stand-off between the executive and the judicial powers along with the ensuing political conflict and social protests has attracted a great deal of media attention. This paper thus focuses on media representation of the judicial reform and those involved in it, along with ideological and cultural factors that influenced particular media choices. Drawing on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods within the methodological frameworks of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (e. g. Partington 2013), we apply the Media Proximization Approach developed by Kopytowska (2013, 2014, 2015a, b, c, 2018) explicating how the socio-political reality is discursively co-constructed and mediated for the general public. We will demonstrate how, by reducing various dimensions of distance (spatial, temporal, epistemic, axiolog-ical, and emotional) between events, issues, and groups presented and the audience, media/journalists increase the salience of issues, along with their emotional appeal, and in this way potentially influence public perceptions and evaluations. The data used comes from the national and international online coverage of post-election conflict in Poland between December 2015 andDecember 2017.
