MEREDEI explores the proposition that news media participate in constructing the horizon of ‘democratic imagination’ conceptualised as the repository of idea(l)s geared towards minimising domination over nonhegemonic identities and bodies. The project posits that this participation can take three forms: news media can preserve, contract or expand democratic imagination. Empirically, MEREDEI studies how these different roles are performed by various news media in Poland. Poland is a particularly relevant case here because it encapsulates the entangled crises of democracy and media. On the one hand, the country has become an oft-cited example of democratic deconsolidation. On the other, the unprecedented levels of media polarisation and journalistic partisanship in Poland are fundamentally at odds with the democratic ethos of journalism. Against this background, MEREDEI starts from the assertion that there is a conflict ongoing in Poland that has a potential to redefine democracy. However, it proposes that the struggle does not play out, as conventionally held, between the ‘anti-democratic’ government led by Law and Justice and the ‘(pro-)democratic’ opposition. Rather, the fault line lies between the alliance of political power with the ‘hegemonic domain’ – including mainstream news media on both sides of the government-opposition division – and the minoritised groups: women, the LGBTQ+ community, and the racially and ethnically othered. Methodologically, MEREDEI uses Foucauldian discourse analysis to interrogate the news media coverage of grassroots actions by minoritised groups that expand the horizon of democratic imagination. The initiatives in question are: 1) the Don’t Call Me ‘Murzyn’ campaign launched by the Afro-Polish community against racism ingrained in the Polish language; 2) the Stop Bzdurom queer collective and its struggle for LGBTQ+ rights; and 3) the All-Poland Women’s Strike movement and its fight for full reproductive rights.