The new Polish government has beheaded all public media to restore the basic principle of impartiality taken away by the Law and Justice party (PiS) in the eight years it was in power. The decision, backed by a parliamentary resolution, was announced today by the Ministry of Culture, after which the news channel of the TVP television network stopped broadcasting. Until further notice, the only image on the screen and on its website is the chain’s logo and a Christmas star.
The Minister of Culture Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz has fired with a stroke of the pen the entire leadership of public broadcasting, that is, all general directors and supervisory boards of TVP, Polish Radio and the PAP news agency. New supervisory boards have already been appointed and will elect new board members.
The reorganization and reorientation of the content of public radio and television is one of the priorities of Donald Tusk’s government, since the public media were monopolized by the PiS and used as channels for partisan propaganda.
The political instrumentation of the media has been a constant but especially visible in the electoral campaign of the elections of last October 15, despite which, the PiS lost the parliamentary majority in favor of the opposition led by the new prime minister, Donald Tusk. According to a report by the European Center for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), an organization financed mainly by the EU Commission, Polish public media acted in the campaign as a “propaganda arm of the arm of the ruling PiS” and They participated in the vilification of their critics.
The OSCE electoral observation mission, for its part, criticized the public broadcaster for broadcasting “clearly in favor of PiS in its information and showing open hostility towards the opposition.” TVP Info in particular became a hate fan. In the news, Tusk was not only a “German agent”, as PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski claimed, but he was “a mean redhead”.
In what is one of the first measures of the Tusk Government to restore the pillars of the Rule of Law, and among them Freedom of the Press, the wave of dismissals has also reached the heads of the main State security offices, such as the Intelligence or Anti-Corruption agency.
From the PiS they have been radically against the measures promoted by Tusk, reminding him that the decisions adopted can only be approved by the National Media Council, promoted during the mandate of former Prime Minister Tadeusz Morawiecki. The rejection is such that PiS called on its followers to go to the TVP headquarters in Warsaw to denounce what they consider to be “an attempt to take over public television by force.” Morawiecki and Kaczynski were the first to arrive. The Police had to cordon off the place.
“There is no democracy without pluralism in the media or without strong media opposed to the Government, and in Poland these are the public media,” said Kaczyski surrounded by his followers in a kind of sit-in dominated by collective amnesia, since his is the erosion of the Polish media.
“We want to make sure that there is legal order in Poland and that there is a free media,” said Marek Suski, another PiS lawmaker, as the sit-in continued. Former PiS Culture Minister Piotr Gliski said the reshuffle of state media ordered by the new government was illegal.
“This is clearly an attack on free media; it is a violation of the law,” Gliski said as PiS leaders promised to continue protests in rotating shifts.
Minister Sienkiewicz, for his part, has asserted that the opponents “will achieve nothing” with their protest while the new ruling coalition committed in the electoral campaign to reestablish the freedoms and rights of a democracy and consequently to return to the radio and public television the impartiality and reliability lost.
