After only two years, Jarosław Kaczyński had to say goodbye to power in Poland. Because in October 2007 Kaczyński’s party “Law and Justice” (PiS) lost a parliamentary election against the liberal-conservative citizens’ platform. The reasons for the defeat were a number of scandals and also a miserable performance by Kaczyński in a television duel against Donald Tusk, then head of the Civic Platform and, after the victory over Kaczyński, Poland’s head of government for seven years.
But Kaczyński blamed others: for example the TV station TVN 24. “We were not aware of the huge defensive front, to which I, which I am not hiding, include your TV station,” poisoned Kaczyński when he was a TVN reporter at the time asked about the reasons for his defeat. The private broadcaster, which belongs to the US group Discovery, is the leading journalist TV company in Poland, which applies to news programs as well as political talk shows and investigative programs. In addition, not only the rulers have their say, but also the opposition.
The latter cannot be taken for granted: when Kaczyński and the PiS came back to power at the end of 2015, they passed illegal media laws and handed over the public television TVP Kaczyński’s “Bull Terrier” Jarosław Kurski. Under him, TVP now manipulates news in such a way that even Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki asks internally for other news sources if someone offers him a TVP report as a basis for political decisions. This emerges from a government email from December 2020.
The government no longer shows any consideration
TVN 24, unlike the freely accessible TVP, can only be received for a fee via cable or satellite – and has long overtaken TVP in terms of the evening news. The station remained a thorn in the side of Kaczyński and the PiS. In 2017, PiS Discovery is said to have offered to buy TVN 24. The Americans refused. Afterwards, a law based on the Russian model was discussed in the PiS, which should limit foreign participation in Polish media houses to a maximum of 20 percent. After warnings from the US government and Brussels, the PiS initially failed to do so.
Such consideration may no longer play a role since the election of Joe Biden as US President and a cooling of relations: On September 26, the broadcasting license of TVN 24 will expire. Although the broadcaster was already broadcasting the Had applied for an extension, the PiS-controlled television and radio council has not granted this to this day. And shortly before midnight on July 7th, PiS MPs introduced a bill to make license renewals illegal.
According to the draft, the television and radio council should only be allowed to grant broadcasting licenses to broadcasters whose owners are predominantly from Poland or from the European economic area (EU plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein). TVN 24 actually falls under this protection: TVN 24 is formally owned by Polish Television Holding, a subsidiary of the US parent company Discovery, which is registered in Holland. But PiS added a point in the draft law, according to which owners who are located in the European Economic Area, but belong to an owner outside of it, should not be protected.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki justified the bill by arguing that Poland wanted to prevent Polish media from being “bought by a Russian, Chinese subject or from the Arab countries”. But the nominal author of the law, the PiS parliamentarian Marek Suski, who is close to Kaczyński, made the Gazeta Wyborcza no secret from the fact that TVN is the target. If the draft becomes law, broadcasters that do not meet the new criteria must sell the controlling majority within six months. “The station has six months to find Polish capital. I don’t know what it’s going to do,” said Suski. TVN itself stated that they would continue to insist on renewing the license.
The opposition has recently felt an upswing
It comes as no surprise that the PiS is now targeting TVN. In autumn 2020, Kaczyński reiterated that it was time to ensure that media in Poland were generally owned by Poles. The state-owned oil company Orlen, led by his trusted friend Daniel Obajtek, took over Poland’s largest regional newspaper group, Polska Press, from the Passau publishing group, where personnel cleanups are already in progress. TVN becomes all the more important as the popularity of the government camp has fallen sharply in recent months and the opposition has grown stronger. In addition to Warsaw’s Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, Donald Tusk, who returned to politics on July 3, has two charismatic, media-savvy leaders who are attacked on TVP but have so far found a platform on TVN.
Whether the law will be adopted is open: Vice Prime Minister Jarosław Gowin, who is part of the governing coalition with his party “Understanding” and without whose votes the law will fail, initially expressed himself critically. Even if the draft remains a draft, the authorities have the means to put TVN under pressure: from the tax office to “litigation on a massive scale”, as the former PiS media tsar Maciej Świrski suggested at the end of 2015. TVN said it would not give in to any pressure. The US embassy in Warsaw said it was following the events surrounding TVN with “growing concern”. The coming week will come Gazeta Wyborcza according to US Secretary of State Matthew G. Boyse to Warsaw to warn the PiS against action against TVN.