A member of Poland’s Senate, the upper house of parliament, has revealed that debt collectors entered his bank account after he stopped paying for his TV licence. He argues that the fee – which less than 8% of households actually pay – has no legal basis and that public media are government “propaganda” outlets.
In theory, people owning a television or radio (with some exceptions) are required to pay a monthly subscription fee, with proceeds going towards funding the public broadcasting channels. However, just half of TV sets are actually registered and only a million of Poland’s 13.5 million households pay for a licence.
Speaking in the Senate on the subject of financing public media, Wadim Tyszkiewicz, an independent senator, admitted that he is among those who no longer pays his subscription.
In an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza, Tyszkiewicz confirmed that he has a television set but does not watch the channels of Telewizja Polska (TVP), the public broadcaster. TVP has been transformed into a mouthpiece for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party in recent years.
The senator says that the station produces “propaganda” and “sells ignorance to the people”. He also believes that it “illegally” take licence fees because the state in its current form is “a different entity” from the one in the communist period with which he began paying a subscription.
The Polish postal service is still responsible for collecting radio and TV subscriptions, a remnant from that time. In 2020 alone, it issued 100,000 enforcement orders to households that have stopped paying for licences, reports Business Insider Polska.
“I once made an agreement with the [communist-era] Polish People’s Republic by collecting a radio and TV booklet at the post office. Today it is a different entity,” Tyszkiewicz said. “I wrote to TVP to ask them to present the legal basis. In response the debt collector entered my account.”
By law, televisions and radios must be registered at the post office, regardless of whether the owner watches or listens to the public broadcaster’s channels. A monthly subscription for using a television costs 24.50 zloty (€5.40), while the rate for a radio is 7.50 zloty. The price is cheaper for people paying for several months in advance.
But whereas people who have stopped paying can expect to be chased up by the postal service, those who have never registered their set are currently unlikely to face repercussions. Furthermore, while inspectors may in theory knock at the door, there is no legal requirement to let them in.
Data from 2019 show that, although more than 96% of Poland’s households have at least one television set, only just over half of them are registered. The majority of these are exempt from paying subscription fees, for example because of the age, invalid status or unemployment of a household member.
Of the remaining 3 million households, less than a million actually pay for their TV and radio licence, reports Bankier.pl, a financial news website.
Last year, the government approved an additional 2 billion zloty of extra funding to subsidise public media. It argues that this money is necessary to compensate for declining income from licence fees. Revenue has dropped from 900 million to 650 million zloty annually over the past two decades as fewer people have paid their subscriptions.
Since PiS came to power in 2015, state broadcasters have been increasingly used to praise the government, promote its narrative and attack its opponents.
This puts them in “flagrant breach of public media’s statutory obligation to present news in a ‘reliable and pluralistic manner’,” according to Freedom House. Reporters Without Borders calls Polish public media “government propaganda mouthpieces”.
PiS and its supporters, however, argue that public broadcasters have always been under the influence of whichever government is in power, and that TVP’s current conservative profile balances out a media landscape dominated by liberal outlets.
Last week, polling by CBOS, a state-linked research institute, revealed the highest ever negative attitudes towards TVP. It found that Poles with a “bad” opinion of TVP (44%) now outnumber those with a “good” one for the first time.
Main image credit: Imamon/Flickr (under CC BY 2.0)
Ben Koschalka is a translator and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.
