In Poland, the conflict over public media continues after the leadership was replaced by the new government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Politicians from the voted-out national-conservative ruling party PiS continued to protest in the TVP building on Thursday.
PiS President Andrzej Duda called the government’s actions “completely unlawful” and a violation of the constitution. Anyone who wants different rules for media management must first change the relevant law, Duda told the Zet radio station. “This is anarchy. It is anarchy to circumvent the existing law,” he said.
Tusk’s law firm boss, Jan Grabiec, tried to calm people down. He called on PiS MPs to stop their “aggressive behavior”. There had already been an initial conversation between Tusk and Duda about the future of the media, he said. “The government intends to make its work on the new public media order open. The president’s voice will be important,” Grabiec said, according to the Onet.pl portal.
The conflict over the media is the most serious between the new government, which won its majority in the October election, and the former PiS state power. Duda is their last high-ranking representative.
Entire leadership fired
On Wednesday, Culture Minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz fired the entire leadership of the public broadcaster in one fell swoop. This affected the CEOs and supervisory boards of the TVP television station, Polish radio and the PAP news agency. The Tusk government accuses the media of spreading party propaganda over the past eight years under the PiS government. International organizations had also criticized the one-sided reporting by the public media in Poland.
The PiS leadership around Jaroslaw Kaczynski protested, speaking of a coup and an attack on democracy and press freedom. Rallies in front of the television headquarters on Wednesday were not very popular. Some PiS representatives also stayed overnight in the TVP building. Normal news operations should resume on Thursday evening under new aegis.
Newspaper: “The television of Jaroslaw Kaczynski”
Other media called on the government to make public broadcasting truly independent. “The PiS has been deprived of its influence on TVP. It was not public television, but the television of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who treated it like his property,” wrote the liberal newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. “Something else is more important, namely how the new government imagines the public media. They will be held seriously accountable for this.”
TVP was never independent like the BBC as a public broadcaster, said media scientist Krzysztof Grzegorzewski from the University of Lodz. Under the PiS, TVP was more comparable to the Russian state broadcaster RT (Russia Today). “But the new government is not talking about building a new BBC either,” he warned.
