Fakt

Fakt is a Polish tabloid-style daily newspaper and the biggest-selling paper in the country, with a circulation of more than 500,000 and an estimated readership of 7 million. The paper was launched in October 2003 by the Polish outlet of the German publishing company Axel Springer AG, Axel Springer Polska, and modeled on Springer's German tabloid Bild, the biggest-selling newspaper in Europe. Like its German counterpart Bild, Fakt is characterised by its downmarket, often sensationalist journalism with a populist appeal. However, politically it is by and large centrist. More recently, it has supported former prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz's policies; Marcinkiewicz also regularly contributes invited comments. Other regular contributors of op-ed pieces include Tomasz Lis, a prominent television journalist with political ambitions, TVN anchorman Kamil Durczok, and former Rzeczpospolita columnist Maciej Rybiński. Untypically for a tabloid and in contrast to its usual content, Fakt has a weekly supplement entitled Europa which contains high-brow (non-original) essays by scholars and public intellectuals, which in 2006 have included Niall Ferguson, Francis Fukuyama, Jürgen Habermas, and Robert Kagan.