DEBATE: The revolution will not be televised #FestiwalKuronia

A panel discussion on media in the age of crisis.

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Featuring panelists: Alex Sakalis (openDemocracy), Annabelle Chapman (Politico Europe & The Economist), and Roman Kurkiewicz (Collegium Civitas). Moderated by Agnieszka Wiśniewska (Krytyka Polityczna).

Governments and politicians attempt to control, mislead, or disarm the media of their ability to earn people’s trust, while markets and corporations tend to commercialize and use them to make people more passive and susceptible to consumerism.

Who will be televising the revolution when it happens, then?

The debate is organized with the support of the European Union’s Europe for Citizens Programme and as part of an international series of debates on the same theme in cities around Europe, including Barcelona, Bratislava, Brussels, London, Sofia and Warsaw.

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Annabelle Chapman: “I write for the mainstream media, so for us the question is how to actually survive in a market full of volatility and precariousness, which is also related to clickability.”

Alex Sakalis: “The idea of openDemocracy is to challenge the general passivity of the reader, the idea that readers consume what is written for them, the idea that journalism is performed essentially by bourgeois liberals. We want an active readership, we want people to come to our site and choose what to read – we don’t want to tell them what to read.”

Roman Kurkiewicz: “The media today in Poland are in fact very precarious and the majority of the people who work for the media work on a freelance and fragmented basis. It is quite common for large mainstream media to take advantage of people who are very young, mostly students.”

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