Career path from Blog entry to IMF chief; riding Polish awe of foreign press to the top

Hand this one to the journalism schools. We need a case study that the kids can learn from. Totally irresponsible news spiral on a supposed Belka candidacy for the post of IMF chief to replace Strauss-Kahn.

Based on a BLOG entry, Poland lived and breathed its hopes that NBP chief Marek Belka, a former IMF heavyweight, might take the post.  At the same time, Poland may have set a new record for the fetishization of foreign opinions concerning Poland. Just don’t tell them the authors are two Poles from the home team in a three-person Dow Jones correspondent bureau.

The all-business news station TVN CNBC couldn’t repeat it enough, nor could sister station TVN24.  “The Wall Street Journal says . . . ” “The Wall Street Journal says . . . .” sounds just too sexy.

Do the google news search:  it made it online for daily papers:  Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita, Puls Biznesu, and forsa.pl, to all of the main Polish portals (thanks in no small part to the media wing of my own agency), and in Polish state radio and state television.

Then do the google translate:  Belka went from being what WSJ considers a good man for the job, to a candidate whose name is being pressed behind various closed doors.

People!  It came from a Blog! Written perhaps with a bit of excess grandeur, it purports to be nothing more than the opinion of two Dow Jones (WSJ) correspondents that Belka has what it would take.

One of the authors, a journalist who has long worn her admiration for Belka publicly, spent some time online trying to clear the record. “This is what you call heating things up!” she wrote on Facebook. “WE DID NOT WRITE that Belka is running for IMF chief, only that HE WOULD FIT THE BILL WELL. And we did not quote NBP CO-WORKERS, but only ‘people who know him.’  It’s just a bit of difference.” (translation mine)

So did Belka.  He called the talk “from another planet.”

“Speculations that a Poles could be the IMF director are entirely unjustified,” he said for . . . TVN CNBC, which continued to press the story and its WSJ credentials for much of the day.

Poland ought to get over its obsession with how outsiders see it or present it. Having the Wall Street Journal – respectable as it is – promote a Polish issue is not reason enough to put aside journalism principles.

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