New Polish government dismisses state media leaders
Parliament passed the resolution to restore "the impartiality and reliability of public service media" on Tuesday with the majority of the new coalition under Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Most MPs from the right-wing conservative PiS, which has been in power until now, boycotted the vote.
After the vote, PiS politicians occupied the state television building on Wednesday night in order to defend "media pluralism", according to their own statements. "There is no democracy without media pluralism or strong media that are critical of the government, and in Poland these are the public media," said PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who joined the protesters together with former head of government Mateusz Morawiecki.
Morawiecki spoke of a "violent intrusion" by the new television leadership. "We are seeing the first step towards a dictatorship," he emphasized to journalists. According to Kaczynski, the PiS politicians want to continue their protests in rotation. PiS MP Marek Suski reiterated on Wednesday that it was about defending "media freedom".
The state news channel TVP stopped broadcasting on Wednesday; instead, only the channel's logo could be seen as a still image. The station's website was also out of action. An AFP reporter also spotted police officers positioned at the headquarters of the state television station.
Following their election victory in October, Tusk and his alliance partners took over the government on Wednesday last week. The opposition and non-governmental organizations had previously repeatedly accused the PiS of increasingly restricting media freedom during its eight years in power, channelling considerable financial resources into the state media and turning them into mouthpieces for government propaganda.
In 2020, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) found that one-sided reporting and "hate speech" were still commonplace in the state media in Poland. The state media had been turned into "government propaganda mouthpieces". In its 2023 report, the organization noted that the PiS government was also increasingly trying to bring private media under its control.
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Source: www.stern.de
