In recent days, a cascade of Western media reports has suggested Poland's conservative Law and Justice party (known by the acronym PiS — pronounced "peace" in Polish) is rapidly moving toward dictatorship. Lurid headlines in major Western media have charged that Poland is undergoing a "disturbing tilt to the right," and asserted that PiS has launched a "coup" against the country's democratic order.

Jackson Diehl, the Washington Post's normally sober and astute foreign affairs columnist (and former Warsaw correspondent), added further fuel to the charged atmosphere, suggesting that Poland is lurching towards censorship of the arts and media, appointing extremists to top security positions, and trying to pack the constitutional court.

Fareed Zakaria used his CNN program on December 6 to soberly reassure viewers about the limited scale of the threat posed by extremist Islamism ("a tiny minority"). By contrast, when it came to Poland, he was alarmist, warning "events have taken a very ugly turn," and asserted the party "appears to be bringing back Soviet-style censorship." This denunciation was accompanied by a banner that declared "an American ally turns authoritarian."

First, a look at the facts. Poland's PiS is fundamentally a mainstream conservative party that includes in its ranks both populists and market-oriented pragmatists. Its leaders represent a spectrum that ranges from moderate, pro-business conservatives to cultural conservatives and ultraconservative nationalists.

Many PiS leaders were heroes of Solidarity's struggle for freedom, while others were heroic dissidents of long standing, who spent decades in the fight against Communist rule. Its top leaders make the case that Poland today still suffers from the compromises made by liberals with the Communist leadership to bring about the country's transition to democracy in 1989.

Poland, they assert, needs to undo some of this damage, in particular by reversing what they claim is the left-liberal stranglehold over state media and state-supported arts institutions, which they regard as excessively anti-religious and secular.

Reporting about PiS, moreover, is influenced by its defense of national sovereignty and its resultant Euroskepticism. PiS's image is further battered by allegations that some of its leaders are homophobic and anti-Semitic. It is true that PiS leaders publicly oppose the legalization of gay marriage and assert the Catholic nature of Poland. But while these conservative views put them at odds with prevailing trends in the European Union, it hardly make them avatars of the far right.

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As a party shaped by dissident anti-Communist activists whose organizations often were infiltrated by informants during their years in opposition, PiS is populated by some leaders who still cling to a conspiratorial view of Polish domestic politics and international relations.

That said, their most significant conspiracy theory — ­one held by PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczyński — is that President Vladimir Putin and the Russian authorities were complicit in the airline crash that killed Kacyzński's twin brother and Polish president Lech in fog on approach to Smolensk, Russia in 2010.

Given the muddled details of the crash, which also took the lives of almost 100 of Poland's leading state officials and political leaders, and given the evidence of Putin's regular resort to clandestine operations, this view, ­though unlikely, cannot be entirely dismissed.

All these threads are woven by critics into a caricature of the leadership of Law and Justice. This caricature blithely ignores the fact that Poland's new president, PiS's Andrzej Duda, is a pragmatic conservative, educated in Poland's elite institutions, and with a track record of participation in liberal politics before he drifted to the moderate right.

Similarly, new Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło flirted only a decade ago with the centrist Civic Platform party before joining the ranks of PiS. The meta-narrative about PiS also conveniently ignores that many of the ministers in the new government are sober-minded officials with longstanding track records of probity in academic life, in diplomacy, and in the business world.

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In the context of this distorted narrative, recent actions by the new PiS leadership are setting off very loud alarm bells in the European and U.S. media. Here again, it is important to separate the wheat from the chaff.

On November 25, the newly elected Sejm — in which PiS has an outright single-party majority of 235 legislators out of 460 deputies — voided the election of five new members of the country's constitutional tribunal.

The vote rescinded action taken in the last weeks of the previous parliament, which had rushed to make a series of questionable judicial appointments to the country’s constitutional court when opinion polls showed that PiS was likely to win the October 25 parliamentary elections.

President Duda refused to swear in the new justices and the new government not only annulled the vote, it selected five new court members in their place.

It is this set of votes and actions that has been labeled a "coup" by Western reporting. First, it is clear that it was the actions of the previous Civic Platform-led parliament that ignited this crisis. Yet there was no Western media condemnation or EU debate, most likely because the action had been taken by a party that is firmly a part of the EU establishment and, unlike PiS, has a strong relationship with the international policy and media worlds.

What was at issue was not a constitutional coup, but overreach by the previous Civic Platform-led parliament.

On December 9, the Polish constitutional tribunal ruled that both PiS and Civic Platform were partly to blame. It decided that the previous parliament illegally voted in two justices prematurely but that it had the constitutional right to vote in replacements for three justices whose mandate expired in early November.

In short, what was at issue was not a constitutional coup, but overreach by the previous Civic Platform-led parliament in the case of two improperly elected justices, and by PiS for voting out three replacement justices, who in the view of the court were elected in accordance with the constitution by the lame duck parliament.

Significantly, if examined carefully the new government's and the president's response to the court is hardly a rejection of its arguments or of its authority. And it certainly does not point to a coup. PiS has not rejected the court's decision on the constitutional question of the lame duck parliament's prerogatives nor even of that parliament's legal right to appoint three of the justices. Instead, PiS leaders argue that the three judges' election is invalid because of procedural errors in the rushed vote.

One may disagree with the judgment of Poland's culture minister, but it hardly represented censorship.

Their case rests on the meaning of the regulations surrounding a vote for constitutional tribunal members, which indicate that such elections require the support of the "parliamentary leadership, as well as that of 50 deputies." According to PiS, the previous parliament failed procedurally to fulfill the first part of the required process, thus invalidating the vote.

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Claims that Poland is entering a new era of "Soviet style" censorship are absurd and insulting to politicians who spent years in jail for fighting the Communist system. What was at issue was hardly censorship. Instead, it was government disapproval of the use of public funds and state institutions to support the presentation of sexually explicit on-stage acts in a play by Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek.

One may disagree with the judgment of Poland's culture minister, but it hardly represented censorship, especially in a prosperous country in which the private sector is a major sponsor of the arts and can do as it pleases.

Nor is it unusual for politicians to debate the proper use of public funds for the arts. Indeed, the use of such funds to promote works that are sexually or religiously inappropriate often leads to similar controversies in other democracies. Such controversies have dogged publicly funded arts in such "Soviet-style" backwaters as the New York City of mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

A final line of attack on the new government revolves around the appointment of Mariusz Kaminski as minister without portfolio with responsibility for coordination of the country's security services. Kaminski had been sentenced to three years' imprisonment earlier this year for abuse of power when he headed the state Anti-Corruption Bureau from 2006-2009.

A careful look at the principal alleged charges against the new PiS government suggests they are far less than meets the eye.

The abuses were related to charges that Kaminski had resorted to entrapment in his investigations, but Kaminski's prosecution was viewed by many as heavily politicized and he was granted amnesty by Duda on November 16. Significantly, Kaminski was not punished for prosecuting opposition politicians; instead his alleged abuses were linked to the investigation of corruption in the ranks of the PiS party's former far-right coalition partner. And while this appointment may be regarded as controversial, it cannot in itself be seen as a threat to political freedom.

In short, a careful look at the principal alleged charges against the new PiS government suggests they are far less than meets the eye. Poland, like all Western democracies, can only benefit from media attention and international vigilance. And Poland will not be hurt by a careful and responsible public airing of developments inside its political institutions. But it is ill-served by alarmist, reflex reactions, and an instinctive bias that has greeted the return to power in Poland of a mainstream conservative party.

Adrian Karatnycky is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and the former president of Freedom House, a democracy-monitoring group.

This article was corrected to clarify the timing of the judicial appointments made ahead of the parliamentary elections.