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It’s old news now but still worth quoting:

Greece passed in January 2005 a ‘media transparency law’ that would have prevented 1% owners of media companies from participating in public sector contracts. In April 2005, the European Commission told Greece that the law violated EU law and threatened to freeze funds for Greek public works projects, leading eventually to Greece’s withdrawal of the law. [...] The story dramatically illustrates sensible, democratically needed legal reforms aimed at both preventing corruption of government and preserving the integrity of the media being sacrificed to supposed free trade principles.

(footnote 92, page 212 of C. Edwin Baker’s Media Concentration and Democracy, 2007.)

Baker is an American. Note: he writes the European Commission, not the parliament, which, according to Michael D. Higgins has tried to limit concentration of ownership: not very successfully, evidently, and yet we’re supposed to be interested in who gets elected to it.

Gazeta Wyborcza’s man on Greece is Jacek Pawlicki. He has recovered somewhat from the shock of his interview on Wednesday with a Polish shopkeeper in Greece. Asked whether she feared for the safety of her shop the redoubtable lady said no, the rioters were only targeting the likes of multinational chains and banks. And your little shop is safe, he asked again. Yes, she repeated. Did she understand the rioters? Yes, was the simple answer. Could something like this happen in Poland? No, she said: Poles were too busy getting rich. It was the best - and certainly the pithiest - piece of social and political analysis I’ve seen in that newspaper in a long, long time.

In another article there is the following: “everybody thinks the government has pumped 28 billion euros into the banks and financial institutions instead of helping people.” It’s not absolutely clear whether this is Pawlicki’s opinion or that of the person he is talking to, a journalist on a “liberal” newspaper. Either way, it makes for strange reading as Gazeta Wyborcza reports as a fact that the Greek government has indeed pumped (that word again – does it just mean “given”?) 28 billion to the banks, that is, not to the people who earned that 28 billion.

In Friday’s article on the situation a chastened Pawlicki steers clear of unpredictable shopkeepers and tells it straight in an article headlined “Students - the Greek Untouchables.” He reports that attempts to reform education in Greece were defeated in 1991, 1992, 1995 and 2002. My understanding of democracy may be a little off here but I would have thought that this comprehensive and repeated expression of public antipathy to a political measure carried some weight in a democracy.* Apparently not. The government tried and failed again last year and Pawlicki writes “reform is essential.” The subhead reads - an amazing stretch of logic here - “If prime minister Karamanlis had succeeded in reforming higher education students would be studying for their examinations instead of burning police stations.” So according to the newspaper if reform were somehow forced on an unwilling populace there would be no law and order problems: cops could shoot children and there would be no violent outburst of anger.

Whatever about GW’s notorious hatred for any expression of public will going beyond a tick on a ballot paper, Pawlicki’s arguments, even on his own terms, are a little less than watertight. He starts off by sneering at “eternal students” who stay on and on in college rather than graduate to unemployment or life on 600 euros a month. (He also takes a typically Wyborczite anti-intellectual swipe at their lecturers with their “cushy numbers” (he means their jobs).) But Pawlicki finishes by saying that if private businesses were allowed to provide university education it would be the end of the brain drain: currently lots of students go abroad for their education but don’t come back, you see. But isn’t the problem - according to Pawlicki - that there are no jobs for graduates and so students prefer to stay in college? What difference would it make if their diploma came from the state or from a factory?

Pawlicki lashes out at students, teachers and the education system in general but also expects that same system to solve Greece’s political, social and economic problems.

* Mind you, Friday’s front page headline is “Lisbon Rises From the Dead” - for the third time at that: better than Jesus.

Gazeta Wyborcza’s motto is “Nam nie jest wszystko jedno,” or “it’s not all the same to us.” The crusading force is strong in this one. There was the schools campaign (motto: the inspired “class with class”), which I am told was a nightmare of added paperwork for the teachers involved — which was nearly all of them, like it or not. Then there was (is?) the “rodzi? po ludzku” (give birth like a human being — I can’t be bothered to translate it any better than that) campaign. The new one is “Przejrzyste wybory” (transparent elections) in which they invite candidates for election to “completely of their own free will” open themselves up to the scrutiny of voters. Just as teachers completely of their own free will opened up their classrooms to the nosey parkers of their local newspapers.

GW’s faith in the efficacy of electoral politics is touching. Doing something more constructive than pestering your local bribe-taker with questions about the traffic jams on the road outside your house is not quite so indulgently viewed. At the moment Greek school teachers are out on strike and have been joined by their pupils. The teachers want more pay; the pupils want easier access to universities; students are unhappy with the favouritism shown by the government to private universities. Today’s paper describes Greek prime minister Kostas Karamanlis as a conservative — not a populist, even though he is reneging on a promise to raise the share of GDP spent on education to a princely 5%. If “populist” means anything, surely it means someone who makes promises not intended to be kept.* Reading between the lines of GW’s report today (by Jacek Pawlicki) it is clear that Greek teachers, pupils and students are joining in a concerted effort to (re-)build what Poles call a “solidarne pa?stwo,” a state based on solidarity. But they’re doing it all wrong. Pawlicki warns that patience with the strikers is wearing thin: parents are “furious” at teachers for using children in the struggle (just as the gutter press and Dziennik were furious at doctors during the recent strike here). Pawlicki’s article contains two direct quotes. One is, inevitably, from Kostas Karamanlis himself. The other is from a blogger who thinks the teachers deserve a kick up the arse for daring to look for more money.

The share of Greek GDP spent on education is kept low so that, among other things, state universities have a shortage of places, driving students into private diploma factories. This is what is happening in Poland now but the Poles are too cowed to do anything more than stump up the exorbitant fees, emigrate, or join in petty media campaigns to paper over the fissures in society. Those with some spirit left in them, like the miners and doctors, who realise that just just because Poland is a democracy doesn’t mean you don’t have to fight for your rights, are routinely denigrated in the quality papers.

Greek Indymedia (in English).

* “Chcesz cukierka, id? do Gierka,” they used to say when the target was not capitalism (it means “if you want a sweetie, ask [first secretary] Gierek”.)