News Media Poland

In a landmark case against Polish press freedoms, a Warsaw district court ruled Monday that journalists can be punished for libel even if they have made good-faith efforts to research and document allegations against public figures. Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Communist, had demanded an apology and about $600,000 in damages for a 1997 article in the right-leaning newspaper Zycie alleging that he met with a top Russian spy at a Baltic Sea resort in 1994, before becoming president.

In Poland, television viewers generally did not have access to any Super Bowl broadcast, but a few newspapers wrote about the imminent game as a strange American phenomenon.

Twenty stories above the Oder River, whose ravenous waters have been devouring this weary Silesian city for nearly two weeks, sits an exhausted man in a camouflage vest tending a mug of nasty-looking coffee.

A press officer for Poland's new Solidarity-led government had just finished giving his first briefing to the news media last year when several local reporters followed him back to his office.

The government on Friday gave Solidarity the right to publish its own daily and weekly newspapers but refused to grant the banned union's demand for access to state-owned television.