Journalism standards

Polish Press Agency (PAP) is a public press agency, the only public agency in Poland. According to its statute, it is obliged to search and provide to its recipients earnest, impartial and comprehensive news items and information from Poland and abroad.

Let me just present you with some selected earnest, impartial and comprehensive quotes from today's PAP article on Spain's deputy Pedro Zerolo's plea to exclude Poland from European Union on the grounds of homophobia. I assure you that I am doing my best to provide a literal translation. The only changes I've made was underlining the most impartial bits.

The Polish Embassy in Madrid received over a hundred letters and tens of phonecalls from Spanish people opposing the statement of a deputy of Spain's governing Socialist party (PSOE), Pedro Zerolo, who called to exclude Poland from the European Union because of alleged discrimination against homosexuals.

[...] "European Union is not a bank that you only go to for subventions. If there is no respect for specific civic and republican values -- out of the EU! There's the door!" said [Zerolo] during last week's debate about "oppression" of homosexuals during Franco's times and regime transformation.

[...] Ruling party's deputy criticised the decision of Polish government as regards the prohibition of propagation of homosexuality in the schools. [Note, no inverted commas around the phrase 'propagation of homosexuality' -- O.] In Spain the government is currently introducing a subject called "civic education", which teaches e.g. about "various sexual orientations" and "various family models": heterosexual and homosexual.

On one hand, it could be argued whether the words oppression and "oppression" are the same and whether a public news agency, funded from public money should be allowed to use inverted commas freely to lessen the weight of certain phrases; my own opinion is that it's such a very delicate matter, they should not be allowed to make their own choices -- these should be left to the reader. Still, inverted commas aside, I do not believe that Zerolo has used the phrase "alleged oppression". Also, strangely enough, PAP's impartial news coverage is so impartial that I recognise PAP-sourced news items before I check the authorship -- if an article mentions "alleged oppression of homosexuals", "civilisation of death" or uses the phrase "murdering unborn children" where you would expect the word "abortion", it's quite obvious that you are reading coverage provided by the only public press agency in Poland, whose statute obliges it to be earnest and impartial.