One of Poland’s leading newspapers printed a front-page apology on Friday for running a story based on an anonymous source that turned out to be false. The report helped lead to the ouster of the country’s deputy interior minister.
Gazeta Wyborcza, a respected daily, said the inaccuracies in a Monday report resulted from false information it received from an anonymous source, and took the unusual step of revealing the source’s identity. The story alleged federal police officers from national headquarters provided organised criminal networks with falsified documents and weapons.
”Gazeta has been deceived,” deputy editors Piotr Stasinski and Piotr Pacewicz wrote in the joint editorial. ”We apologise to our readers, we apologise to the public, we apologise to the policemen and their superiors who felt offended by … false information about a scandal within their ranks.”
The report, the latest in a string of stories about corruption in the nation’s police forces, provoked outrage and prompted Interior Minister Ryszard Kalisz to tender his resignation. Prime Minister Marek Belka rejected the offer, but instead fired deputy interior minister Andrzej Brachmanski.
While the media in the United States have been rocked lately by allegations of spurious reports, most recently with Newsweek retracting a story based on anonymous sources that Guantánamo Bay interrogators flushed a Qur’an down the toilet, the scandal is the first of its kind to hit Poland.
”The credibility of journalists has been undermined with this case,” said Krystyna Mokrosinska, the president of the Association of Polish Journalists. ”The belief that you can believe a source has been undermined.”
Immediately after the publication of the report, Brachmanski, the deputy minister, said it was 99% false and called it ”political science fiction”.
Following his dismissal on Wednesday, he commented bitterly that ”a fly and a politician have one thing in common — they both can be finished off by a newspaper”.
Gazeta Wyborcza stood by its story initially, but after conducting an investigation discovered that its main source — Janusz Tkaczyk, the police chief in the central Polish city of Lodz — passed on false information that he had received from a former colleague and friend.
Tkaczyk, who maintains he believed the information was true, was fired on Friday by Kalisz. The source of his information, Jan Markowski, head of the federal police’s regional office of investigations in the northern city of Olsztyn, was also dismissed.
Tomasz Patora, one of the Gazeta Wyborcza investigative reporters who wrote the original corruption story, said on TVN24 that even though protecting sources is ”a sacred rule” of journalism, it cannot be afforded to people who provide information meant to deceive, like Markowski. — Sapa-AP