Polish Minister of Culture Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz dismissed the heads of public television, radio and the state press agency. He also appointed new supervisory boards, which called in new management of these media outlets, TVN 24 television reported on Wednesday. The TVP Info news channel stopped broadcasting. According to the ministry, the decision was taken on Tuesday, when the lower house of parliament, with the majority of votes of the new government coalition, adopted a resolution on restoring the impartiality of public media. MPs from the now-opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has controlled the public media for the past eight years, boycotted the vote and gathered at the headquarters of the TVP television station to, they say, defend media freedom and democracy.
Sienkiewicz dismissed the heads of public television TVP and public radio PR and the state news agency PAP. According to the ministry, he acted as a body exercising the powers of the state, which owns one hundred percent of the shares in the relevant companies, and as such dismissed the previous chairmen of the boards of directors.
The new government has promised to reform the media, which critics say has come under political influence under PiS rule. The Reuters agency previously wrote that the TVP Info channel became an outlet for the then government’s propaganda.
“The Sejm (the lower house of parliament) (…) calls on all state authorities to immediately take measures aimed at restoring constitutional order in terms of citizens’ access to reliable information and the functioning of public media,” reads the resolution, which on Tuesday was supported by 244 deputies, 84 of them were against and sixteen abstained from voting. More than a hundred PiS legislators did not participate.
PiS politicians spent the night at TVP headquarters
Dozens of politicians from this party went to TVP. “We defend the independence of Polish television,” she wrote, according to the station’s server TVN24 former Deputy Speaker of the Sejm Malgorzata Gosiewská. According to this website, the head of Law and Justice Jaroslaw Kaczyński or former Minister of Defense Mariusz Blaszszak also arrived at one of the buildings of the public law station, while ex-prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki appeared at another.
PiS politicians will hold a “service” of ten people on Polish television, he announced, according to the website Onet Kaczynski. TVP employees also decided to express their disapproval of Tuesday’s vote by the new parliamentary majority. The information bar moving at the bottom of the screen changed color from red to black, Onet described. After the dismissal of the heads of the public media, the broadcast of the TVP Info channel ended, and the website does not work either.
If I am here illegally, call the police, the new head of the TVP told PiS members
PiS politicians spent the whole night at the TVP headquarters, Kaczynski left the building only at six o’clock in the morning, TVN 24 reported. “We defend free media. We think that there should be more than just TVN in the world. We want Poles to have a choice,” said ex-Minister of Agriculture Robert Telus. His predecessor in office, Henryk Kowalczyk, in turn, said that he did not participate in Tuesday’s vote on the media because “he will not participate in a farce” and because the law cannot be violated by a resolution of the lower house. “We are simply defending democracy, freedom of speech,” said another former PiS minister, Marek Suski.
“In every democracy there must be a strong anti-government media. It happened that in Poland it is public media,” Kaczyński said, adding that this situation will not change in the near future. According to him, PiS is “obstructing the right of citizens to access information”.
According to the Onet server, the new head of the TVP supervisory board, Piotr Zemla, arrived at the television headquarters and spoke with PiS politicians. “Call the police if you think I’m here illegally,” he said, according to the portal.
PiS filled the management of the television with related people
According to critics, Polish public media have come under the extremely strong influence of the then-ruling Law and Justice Party over the past eight years, with the party filling their leadership positions with its own people. In particular, TVP’s coverage before the recent parliamentary elections was filled with attacks on the opposition at the time, led by the chairman of the Civic Coalition, Donald Tusk.
“After PiS took over the public media in a flash in 2016, TVP and Polish Radio did not report on government affairs, did not criticize government policies, but aggressively attacked the opposition at the time and organized harassment against its representatives. At that time, about a thousand people were fired from the public media and turned into purely propaganda channels,” wrote the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
Law and Justice, led by Kaczyński, won the parliamentary elections in October, but in the Sejm, Tusk’s Civic Coalition won the majority together with the centrist Third Way and the New Left, which subsequently formed the government. The new Prime Minister Tusk and his cabinet ministers were sworn in by President Andrzej Duda a few days ago.
2023-12-20 11:37:30
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