Poland: Populists protest new government's media reforms

Polish right-wing populists protested in the state television premises in Warsaw on Wednesday a day after the new ruling pro-EU coalition under Donald Tusk adopted a resolution calling for the "impartiality and reliability of the public media" to be restored.

The resolution comes after eight years under the right-wing conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party during which the national broadcaster was widely seen as a government mouthpiece.

The Culture Ministry also announced on Wednesday that the chairpersons and boards of the state television, radio and news agency had been sacked in the course of implementing Tuesday's resolution.  

What are the protesters saying?

PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who is among those protesting, said on Tuesday: "There is no democracy without media pluralism or strong anti-government media, and in Poland these are the public media."  

He said PiS politicians would continue the protest on rotating shifts.

Another PiS lawmaker, Marek Suski, said that "we want to make sure that there is legal order in Poland and that there are free media." 

Their statements sit uneasily with a widespread consensus on the part of both the former opposition and media NGOs that the press under the PiS was anything but free.

In its 2020 report, Global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said, "Partisan discourse and hate speech are still the rule within [Poland's] state-owned media, which have been transformed into government propaganda mouthpieces."

The European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), which is mainly funded by the European Commission, also slammed the state media under the rule of the PiS.

"The public media have completely transformed into a propaganda arm of the ruling PiS and serve not only to promote the party's interests, but also to attack and denigrate its critics," it said in a report.

PiS lawmakers largely boycotted Tuesday's vote.

tj/fb (AFP, dpa, AP)