Change of government in Warsaw
Poland: Public media leadership fired
Donald Tusk is the new Prime Minister of Poland. The restructuring and reorientation of public broadcasting is one of his government’s priorities. photo
© Leszek Szymanski/PAP/dpa
During the election campaign, the public media were repeatedly accused of reporting one-sidedly and of having turned into a “propaganda arm of the PiS”. The new government is now planning a restructuring.
Poland’s new pro-European government has fired the entire leadership of the public media. The decision affects the CEOs and supervisory boards of the TVP television station, Polish radio and the PAP news agency, the Ministry of Culture said Warsaw with. New supervisory boards have already been appointed and they will elect new board members.
The restructuring and reorientation of public broadcasting is one of the priorities of Donald Tusk’s government. She accuses the media of spreading party propaganda over the past eight years under the national-conservative PiS government.
Parliament: Media have lost their legal mandate
On Tuesday evening, Parliament passed a resolution to “restore the legality and impartiality” of the public media. It said these media had lost their legal mandate to provide reliable and impartial information and had become partisan media. The Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of State Participation, which is involved in the institutions through ownership committees, must now take corrective action.
In the election on October 15, a three-party alliance of the former opposition led by Tusk won the government majority. The PiS, which had been in power since 2015, lost power.
Media as the “propaganda arm of the PiS”
International organizations had criticized the public media’s one-sided reporting on the election campaign. These have “completely transformed themselves into a propaganda arm of the ruling PiS” and are participating in the denigration of their critics, according to a report by the European Center for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), which is mainly financed by the EU Commission.
The OSCE election observation mission complained that the public broadcaster “clearly favored the PiS in its reporting and at the same time showed open hostility towards the opposition.”