"We as citizens will need to be assured that a new government would have faith in democracy, Europeanism and freedom guaranteed by law,” Olga Tokarczuk’s says two weeks before Poland goes to the polls in a potentially pivotal election on 15 October.
"We need assurances that such a government would listen to us and respond to our needs, and not, like the present one, subordinate the majority of citizens to anachronistic ‘traditional values’ adhered to only by a 30% minority,”
Well, the Press in my home country is surpringly decent (really surprisingly so, given that my home country is Portugal and I’m quite critical of it, but it was painfully visible just how much the difference is when I came back from Britain), so I tend to watch some local TV channels and read a local newspaper and magazine.
I used to read The Guardian a lot when living in Britain and for a while after, mainly because all others newspapers there really are rags, as well as watch Channel 4 (as the BBC is highly partisan in news terms), but The Guardian has for over a decade now been moving away from the hard-nosed journalism that published the Snowden Revelations back in the day (I would say that the kicking out of the editor that went ahead and published it was a turning point) and diving ever harder into Identity Wars and away from all else meaningfull for how society works, all the while the world is crumbling all around us (even when they talk about the Environment they’ll avoiding the elephant in the room which how Consumer Society is incompatible with it, so our Economic system too has to change) and certainly are not at all critical of The System for distributing Power and Wealth in Britain and elsewhere (as exemplified by their coverage of The Royals, which is fawning to the point of making it repugnant) plus they’ve become even more English-Exceptionalists (i.e. they believe they’re a superior nation with superior people) than before.
They also used to have a livelly comments section (which in the last few years often had more insightfull and well informed takes than the article itself) but it has become less and less open (it’s only in some articles, and nowadays none of the ones pushing a certain political line never has comments open) and more and more censored, so I stopped participating.
I actually have a tab on my browser open with The Guardian right now but last couple of times over the last few weeks I went there and had a look around, nothing really caught my attention, probably because for things like the coverage of the War In Ukraine, there are a few comentators on TV here in Portugal which are way, way ahead of that newspaper (in terms of both breath and depth of analysis) and The Guardian’s coverage on Europe is basically “Look at all those bad things over there and how we’re better than them”, plus as I said, certain takes on things have become “beyond and and all criticism” by not having comments open, so you really only get the Party Line.
(PS: it’s funny that Portugal, having had quite a revolutionary-leftwing period after the 1974 Revolution that overthrew Fascism, actually has quite a number of “intellectuals” who were once communist party youth members, so have spend long periods there, speak russian, have friends there and are reasonably familiar with both Ukraine and Russia, whilst being strongly pro-Democracy, so we have a few quite insightfull commentators on that war who don’t just fall for the Russia-Good partisan beliefs of tankies. It helps that, as my country doesn’t really have any national-exceptionalism beliefs, they tend to be open to understanding the ways of doing things abroad rather than the looking at everything from their own “superior” cultural standpoint that one so often gets in British coverage of foreign affairs)