WARSAW, Poland -- The communist government warned Western news media Tuesday against telling 'cynical lies' about Poland and said it may set up an international tribunal to set standards for correspondents and determine what is true in news reports.
At a weekly briefing for Western correspondents, government spokesman Jerzy Urban spent 50 minutes listing what he said were false reports in Western media on recent Polish affairs, including strikes called by the outlawed Solidarity trade union.
'We will not agree to being defenseless in the face of cynical lies,' Urban warned some 20 Western reporters. 'We will use any means to defend ourselves against propaganda aggression.'
Urban said purportedly false news reports created problems in East-West relations and the 1975 Helsinki agreement that guarantees the free flow of information between European nations.
Asked if the government considered restricting Western reporting from Poland, urban said, 'If untrue reports were restricted, it would benefit Poland ... and international relations.'
He announced the government may initiate an international body -- an institute or a journalist tribunal -- that would seek to set standards for correspondents working in foreign nations.
'Such an institution would also determine what is a lie and what is not a lie,' the government spokesman said.
Urban was particularly concerned that Western media had reported thousands of workers joined work stoppages eight days ago in protest of 15 percent meat price increases.
'There are 40,000 work places in Poland and none of them had any strikes on their premises,' Urban said, lashing out at Western reporters for quoting sources as saying there were protests.
Solidarity called on workers to strike for an hour July 1 against the price hikes. Independent observers admitted it met minimal response from Poland's 12 million workers.
Sources said the largest protest was at Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, where Solidarity was founded in 1980. About 90 percent of the 12,000 workers downed tools for an hour, the sources said.
'The Western press report things that did not happen,' Urban said, but admitted there were isolated protests July 1.
In one such incident, Solidarity activist Henryk Grzadzielski was sentenced to a year in prison for leading a strike against the price hikes at a agricultural plant in Slupsk in northern Poland.
Along with the higher prices, a get-tough law went into effect that empowered misdemeanor courts to impose jail terms of up to three years for participating in illegal gatherings. Under the old law, offenders could be jailed for a maximum of three months.
