Battle for media sovereignty - Poland's new government dissolves state media for "restructuring"
Donald Tusk's new Polish government wants to formally dissolve the public media, but keep the jobs. "Following the decision by Poland's president to suspend funding for public media, I have decided to put TVP, Polish Radio and the PAP news agency into liquidation," wrote Culture Minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz on the X platform on Wednesday. In this way, the continued functioning of these media could be ensured and their restructuring continued.
Poland has been arguing about public media for years
With this step, the dispute between the new and old government camps over public media has entered the next round. Last week, Sienkiewicz fired the entire management of the public broadcasters in one fell swoop. The Tusk government accuses the media of spreading party propaganda in recent years under the now voted out national-conservative PiS government. International organizations had also criticized the one-sided reporting of the public media in Poland.
On Saturday, Poland's President Andrzej Duda, who belongs to the PiS, vetoed a law passed by Tusk 's government that provided for the subsidization of public broadcasters with the equivalent of 690 million euros. Duda justified his move by stating that this was a circumvention of the constitution and a breach of constitutional principles. He demanded that the public media must first be thoroughly restored in accordance with the law.
Following the elections in October, the new pro-European Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his alliance partners took over the government in Warsaw two weeks ago. The opposition and non-governmental organizations had repeatedly accused the previously ruling PiS party 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 right-wing nationalist government propaganda.
In 2020, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) found that one-sided reporting and "hate speech" were 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
