Parallel realities – the image of the candidates for the President of the Republic of Poland in 2020 in "Gazeta Wyborcza" and "Nasz Dziennik"

Abstract

This article is about the image of politicians created by mass media, which differs depending on ideological closeness between the candidate and media. Media, creating their own symbolic universes, form in consumers premade interpretative schemes, which eliminate need of individual thinking and will to recognize the truth about empirical reality. The author made use of presidential election in Poland, which took place in 2020, and the two candidates who made it to the second round: Andrzej Duda and Rafał Trzaskowski. The author took into consideration two national dailies: “Gazeta Wyborcza” and “Nasz Dziennik” issued between 29th June 2020 and 11th July 2020. This article introduces a hypothesis which claims that the analysed dailies did not hide their sympathy for a particular candidate and were critical towards his competitor and the analyzed national dailies more often include critical or affirmative texts than ambivalent or neutral ones. In this article both quantitative and qualitative methods were used.