The new Polish government has gutted the top management of public television, making good on a campaign promise to reform a broadcaster that functioned as a mouthpiece of its rightwing populist predecessor, but also prompting criticism of their methods from some quarters.
The government led by prime minister, Donald Tusk, was sworn into office last Wednesday. It has promised to launch an ambitious programme to reverse the damage done to rule of law in the country during eight years of government by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Under PiS, state media was accused of promoting the party’s policies and launched vicious, personal attacks on opposition figures, and Tusk in particular. “We will need exactly 24 hours to turn the PiS TV back into public TV. Take my word for it,” Tusk said during a campaign rally in early October. In the end, it has taken his government a week. On Tuesday, the new parliament adopted a resolution calling for the restoration of “impartiality and reliability of the public media”. After the resolution, the new culture minister, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, announced that the chairs and boards of state television, news and radio had all been removed.
For a bit more context:
Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość - PiS) has illegally taken control of state media back in 2016. Normally the chairs and boards of state media are managed by the National Council of Radio and Television (Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji - KRRiT). This is a constitutional provision, and members of the Council have terms. So PiS passed a law that moved these competences to a new body, that they created. That law was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court (Trybunał Konstytucyjny - TK), which normally would mean the end of the story, so what did PiS do?
They ignored the courts.
New leadership of the state TV got an increase in funding and set to work turning it into a propaganda tube for the party. Most of old presenters left in protest, but that didn’t deter the people in charge. For the past 8 years, the formerly decently impartial state TV, that used to report on government corruption and scandals, became an unceasing stream of adoration for “the greatest government in history, that valiantly fights for the betterment of Poles”. People compared the primitive propaganda of the past 8 years to that of Best Korea (to the point that you should be able to find on YouTube DPRK’s propaganda videos with audio from Polish state TV replacing the original audio)
So when the right wing populist government finally “fell off a bike”, as we say in Poland, the priority of the new team was to undo the clusterfuck that were state media.
Yesterday (20th of December) at 11:00, Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, decreed, based on the Code of Trading Companies (which governs regular companies as well as state enterprises), that the chairs and boards of Polish Television, Polish Radio and Polish Press Agency (all state owned) were fired, and who would be their replacements.
18 minutes later, the news channel TVP Info stopped broadcasting, and it’s signal was replaced with TVP 1. Over the next hours the new leader of state TV arrived at its headquarters and slowly but surely, the new team took back the media, including the social media accounts of the state TV. Last holdouts included Twitter/X.
Obviously we were all following this with bated breath, including the ad hoc protest of around 200 people in defence of “independent media”, and “constitutional order” i.e. screaming that it’s not fair that the old team doesn’t get to keep spewing propaganda for our tax money.
At 19:30 instead of regular news segment, old (pre-2016) presenter came on air and said that everyone deserves to have actual news instead of propaganda in the state TV that they paid for, and that the news segment will return tomorrow (in other words today - 21st of December).
I can assure you, that for the first time in 8 years thousands, if not millions of Poles, will turn on the state TV.
For some additional things:
There was a vote about a motion to “depoliticise the state media” in Parliament. Law and Justice MPs didn’t take part in the vote because… They went to state TV to protest the changes (when reporting on that, the state TV, at the time still loyal, covered the number of MPs who voted against)
Two PiS MPs were declared guilty in a 6-year long trial that same day. They automatically lost their mandates for this, and instead of going to the Police… They also went to the state TV headquarters. The Police followed them, which prompted cries of “police brutality” from the protesters (ironic, considering they were the ones who used police brutality just a few months earlier).
A presenter from TVP hijacked a farming news segment to rant about the takeover, until the power was cut off, ending his rant mid-sentence.
Former TVP employees went to a private right-wing news to hold their own news segment at 19:30, lulz were had.
That’s about it.
EDIT: some spelling mistakes
Well, good for them. I hope they’re able to swing it back to neutral. It sounds like a daunting task.
It’d be nice to see partisanship undone on a public good.
Wow… nice post. Thanks for your writeup.
How was the news?
People cried watching them. Seriously.
Some stuff was obviously done with sticks and scotch tape so to say, since the takeover was very chaotic, the new team didn’t really have much resources. But it seems a lot of lower level people have been retained.
The first segment was about the takeover itself, and while it kinda reeked of propaganda, after they’ve shown the government’s justification for the whole thing, they brought up the President’s response. And he is from Law and Justice, the previous team. This is what made people cry, since for the first time in 8 years you could hear the opposition voices in state media.
It only got better from there with the budget, where every party got a moment, and the sentencing of those two MPs I’ve mentioned in main comment.
Overall rather bland, but most people say that’s what public media should be like - bland and including every side involved.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that every view should be acceptable, but they should be inclusive, even to those with fringe views.