Poland Does the Best It Can

How to follow the Pope's visit: with good will and credit cards

Reporting from Poland under martial law can present difficulties. Access to officials is limited, contacts with citizens are often monitored, and authorities sometimes react strongly to reporters who displease them. Last year officials temporarily lifted the credentials of a New York Times correspondent; in January the government expelled a U.P.I. reporter on charges of obtaining military intelligence and denied a visa to a BBC correspondent to protest statements made in a documentary.

Thus news organizations had every reason to worry about how the Poles would handle the daunting task of accommodating 700 foreign journalists covering the visit of Pope John Paul II, a story of potent political import. As it turned out, Poland performed impressively for an Iron Curtain country. There were few overt obstacles to coverage, except a lack of open, informed sources and an enforced distance from the main events. Lamented one photographer: "Every papal trip, I have to get a bigger lens because I am farther away."

Veterans of the Pope's 17 previous foreign pilgrimages rated this one among the toughest--and costliest. Reporters were expected to pay on arrival, in foreign exchange, for all services that they would need from the Polish agency Interpress. Among the fees: $70 just to get into a room with telephones and telex transmission machines, with further costs for actually using the facilities; up to $150 a night for double hotel rooms or, when they were full, $45 a night for space in a youth hostel; $230 a day for a Ford Granada car and driver; up to $260 to ride in a press bus following the Pope along his route; $1,350 to ride in a Soviet M12 helicopter for three hours (which almost certainly meant landing far away from where the Pope touched down). Television reporters ran up individual tabs of as much as $20,000. The rates were hardly unique--papal trips to Zaire and West Germany cost more--but were double or greater than what Poland charged during the papal visit in 1979. And for the first time in John Paul's travels, Vatican correspondents were billed for accreditation and for buses to follow him. Among the biggest bills: $1 million for the U.S. network NBC, about $600,000 each for CBS and ABC. One big consolation: the Poles, in their eagerness for hard currencies, accepted credit cards.

Paying for the services did not, moreover, guarantee that they would be available. Green and tan credentials issued to reporters were not valid for such major events as the Pope's first meeting with Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski and the memorial Mass for Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski. For those occasions, the government issued blue passes to a small fraction of the accredited reporters. Said Reporter Barry James of U.P.I.: "Having a press card entitled you to go into the press center and watch events on closed-circuit television." The telecasts were sometimes hours late, and no one in authority seemed able to say when, or if, footage would be shown.

Although the Polish government, and the Vatican as well, complained that the Western press overplayed the political implications of the Pope's homilies, officials made no effort to limit press contacts with the citizenry, except when riot police were confronting a mob scene. When a crowd grew fractious in Nowa Huta, police told foreign journalists, "Go away, this must be settled among Poles." In Wroclaw on June 21, as armed ZOMO patrolmen broke up noisy demonstrations, seven journalists were taken to jail, then released with an apology. In the end, reporters were good-naturedly ready to let Poland be Poland. Summed up Don Kimelman of the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Considering the complex logistics, it would be unfair to complain that the service did not meet our Western standards." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.