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Polish media and opposition fight to save press freedom from state control

By:   []

Date: 2021-08

More than 1,000 journalists in Poland have signed an open letter to oppose a controversial media bill in the largest ever initiative of the country’s journalistic community.

Reporters and the opposition say that the bill is an attempt by the ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), to tighten its grip on critical media in a country that has, over the past six years, slipped from 18th place in a World Press Freedom Index compiled by the non-profit group Reporters Without Borders, to 64th, its lowest ever ranking.

The bill, passed by the lower chamber of parliament last week, would prevent non-EU companies from holding a controlling stake in Polish media. The government has claimed that the law “in no way limits media freedom” and is intended to prevent media outlets from being “bought by an entity from Russia, China, or an Arab country”. But in practice it targets one particular, popular news station that is often critical of the government: TVN.

If passed by the senate and President Andrzej Duda, the law will force the American media group Discovery to sell its majority stake in TVN and allow publicly owned companies, such as those in the Polish energy sector, to buy the station out, according to Marta Kotwas, a doctoral researcher specialising in Polish politics and society at University College London.

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Anna Wojcik, a reporter at OKO.press, a Polish non-profit investigative journalism website, said that PiS, which came to power in 2015, has never had so much influence over public media as now, as it has attempted to suppress critical voices through legislation and lawsuits.

The new bill has heightened fears among journalists that Poland is trying to replicate the market regulations that took place in Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary, where the state took control of most mainstream media. The letter, which was initiated by Mariusz Jałoszewski, OKO.press journalist, and Wojciech Czuchnowski from Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s biggest daily newspaper, described the bill as the final stage of “taking control of one of the last institutions that holds the country’s authorities accountable”.

Risks to credibility and investment

The bill was opposed by the majority of Poland’s opposition parties, including the Agreement party, which was one of PiS’s two junior partners in the government’s United Right coalition since 2015. A day before the media reform vote, the party left the coalition after the prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki fired its leader, Jaroslaw Gowin.

Gowin, a vocal opponent of the PiS leadership, had clashed with Morawiecki over various issues, including the media bill, which he warned would hurt the country’s credibility, damage the investment climate and “above all, expose us to a completely irrational fight with our main security guarantor, the US”.

Agreement’s departure left the government without a majority in the 460-member Sejm, the lower house of parliament, forcing it to scramble for support from other groupings. The bill still has to go through the senate, where the opposition holds a slim majority and will likely reject it. Tomasz Grodzki, speaker of the senate, said on Twitter after the vote: “The democratic majority in the senate will never approve an attack on media independent of the government.”

If the senate rejects the bill, PiS would have to find a bigger majority at the lower house to overrule that veto. But its “majority is no longer secure”, according to Wojcik, and the media bill could be a “test” for the ruling party’s ability to draw in support. In previous years PiS had it very easy, with a clear majority in both parliament and the senate, allowing it to push through legislation in a matter of hours. “The dynamics in parliament have significantly changed and the outcome is not certain,” she added.

The media bill is part of a years-long sustained drive by PiS to ‘repolonise’ private media. “The Polish media should be Polish,” said Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the ruling party’s chairman and the country’s de facto leader, who has long claimed that foreign participants hold outsize influence in Polish public debates.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/polish-media-and-opposition-fight-save-press-freedom-state-control/
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