Agent or Scene? Foreign Correspondents’ Rhetorical Framing of Poland in Their Reflections on Their Own Reporting Practices

Abstract

ABSTRACT The distribution of foreign correspondents across the globe indicates countries’ newsworthiness, particularly significant when media companies withdraw their journalists residing abroad. This article analyzes in-depth interviews with foreign correspondents in Poland, which has changed dramatically during the 30 years preceding the research. It answers the questions of (1) What are the facts and issues in Poland’s recent history that foreign correspondents selected as particularly meaningful and worth reporting to their audiences? (2) And how did they frame them, contributing to the country’s popular understanding and positioning in the political, economic, and cultural global order? The continuous drop in newsworthiness of Poland indicates its normalizing situation as a semi-peripheral country. Rhetorical analysis of how the correspondents talked about Poland show a prominent scene-act ratio. Poland’s image shifts from a recognized agent of the bloodless democratic revolution, metaphorically rather than geographically distant to Western European countries, a scene of economic and mental transformation to an EU member, an agent coping surprisingly well with the economic crisis and a scene of values changes as well as new political and social cleavages of the local importance. It is a country where history and memories of the past have relevance in contemporary politics and where its representations in foreign media resonate and provoke political reactions.