Turning propaganda into public service broadcasting in Poland

By Janek Lasocki

State television has always been under political influence, but the current government has taken that to unprecedented extremes, turning TVP into a propaganda mouthpiece. While it is hard to imagine now, there are ways to make the station a genuine public service broadcaster, as the experience of one of Poland’s neighbours shows.

“Lies and manipulation are increasingly common in the public sphere,” warned the newsreader on Wiadomości, the flagship evening news show on Polish state broadcaster TVP in September. “And irresponsible words, fake news and lies can have tragic consequences.”

She was speaking about an opposition MP, but anyone familiar with the Polish public broadcaster in the past six years would know her words were actually a far more apt description of her own channel, which has been turned into an unashamed government mouthpiece.

Lies, manipulation and irresponsible words

There are many examples of TVP – which is taxpayer funded and statutorily obliged to be politically neutral – pushing the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party’s political agenda and ideological viewpoint. Indeed, they saturate coverage every day.

After climate change campaigner Greta Thunberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, TVP showed her alongside two previous recipients of the title, Hitler and Stalin. Another time, a photo of her alongside philanthropist George Soros was shown to viewers, allegedly proving some sort of conspiracy.

In fact, the image was a fake widely shared by far-right groups online. TVP has on a number of occasions shown false or misleading images, clips and quotes that fit the government’s political message.

Such propaganda ramps up ahead of elections. In 2019, when PiS was running on an anti-LGBT platform, TVP aired Inwazja (Invasion), a highly manipulative “documentary” revealing the sinister “aims, methods and money” of the LGBT community. It was aired just before parliamentary elections (and later ordered to be taken off YouTube by a court). Migrants and refugees are also routinely portrayed as a threat.

The broadcaster also openly smears critics of the government. Opposition parties are particular targets, accused just most recently of working to” Putin’s plan”, trying to “Islamise Poland” or “take Poles’ money”. Ahead of last year’s presidential election, TVP’s news broadcasts suggested that the main opposition candidate, Rafał Trzaskowski, was seeking to “fulfil Jewish demands”.

Since Donald Tusk returned to national politics earlier this year as leader of the largest opposition party, he has featured almost daily on Wiadomości – and always negatively. News segments mentioning Tusk regularly include a two-second clip of him speaking in German: “für Deutschland” (for Germany) and “danke für alles” (thank you for everything), phrases taken out of context from a speech to the CDU party when he was chair of the EPP (the grouping of European conservative parties).

Since January the clip has been played on TVP news at least 98 times. The message is simple: Tusk serves Germany’s interests, not Poland’s.

Irrespective of your view of the former prime minister, showing Tusk speak one phrase in German on loop on national television is objectively absurd and has little in common with journalism. It might even be funny, except for the realisation it is an intentional taxpayer-funded campaign against one individual for the benefit of the ruling party.

In contrast, government figures and policies are praised daily without exception.

The fact that TVP is today a government mouthpiece is widely recognised by domestic and international bodies. Observers from the OSCE concluded during the 2020 elections that TVP “acted as a campaign vehicle for the incumbent”, President Andrzej Duda (who earlier in the year had approved an extra 2 billion zloty of annual funding for the channel).

Reporters Without Borders, an NGO, calls it a “government propaganda mouthpiece”. A report commissioned by the state broadcasting regulator, KRRiT, found that by watching TVP “one can get the impression Poland is a one-party state”. State research agency CBOS has found that public opinion of TVP has fallen constantly since 2016, reaching its lowest ever levels.

Justifying, not denying

Even leading figures in PiS do not really seek to deny what TVP has become. Instead, they offer two justifications for this: first, that its current bias is a necessary counter-balance against an otherwise left-liberal media landscape; second, that every previous government also used TVP for its own ends. Both arguments are wrong.

Senior PiS MP Jacek Sasin, who is now a deputy prime minister, told journalists in 2018 that “if TVP presents the government’s perspective, one reason is because the majority of commercial channels are dominated by the opposition viewpoint”.

That statement is in itself questionable: although TVN, one of the two main private broadcasters, is critical of PiS, the other, Polsat, is not. There are also a number of smaller private channels – such as TV Republika and TV Trwam – that offer PiS-friendly coverage.

Yet such arguments are in any case irrelevant, because TVP is not a private broadcaster and its public service mandate is quite clear. Under Article 21(1) of the Broadcasting Act 1992, TVP must provide services that are “pluralistic, impartial, well-balanced, independent and innovative, as well as of high quality and integrity”.

There is no possible interpretation of the law, written in the shadow of years of communist party propaganda, that would allow TVP to be used to be used for the benefit of any one political side, even as a counterweight to the alleged biases of other channels.

It was always this way

The other excuse is that “it was always this way”. Speaking last year, President Duda said “the situation with public television is bad, but it’s not a question of just the past few years but it’s been a problem for a long time…it’s a type of electoral loot”.

It is true that, under previous governments, many politicians have sought to influence the public broadcaster, leading to boycotts, calls to end the licence fee and accusations of politicisation. Since the fall of communism, however, it is impossible to find anything comparable to the propaganda viewers are treated to today.

Robert Kwiatkowski (TVP’s chairman from 1998 to 2004) is often cited as an example of someone who showed bias to then President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (whose campaign he had previously worked on) by providing more and preferential coverage.

Yet back then, when TVP broadcast an aggressive interview with Kwaśniewski’s main electoral rival, the presenter was suspended and the channel issued an apology. After initially refusing to show footage of the president drunk at a war cemetery, within a week the news editor played the footage anyway. Such responses are difficult to imagine at TVP today.

When Civic Platform (PO) came to power in 2007, it was actually opposition parties SLD and PiS that initially divided TV and radio among themselves (rather than the governing party), nominating people to key positions on “their channels”, which led to visible differences in how the communist past or Smolensk air crash were presented on TVP1 and TVP2. In PO’s second term (according to TVP’s own figures), the ruling party did get disproportionate coverage.

What happens today is qualitatively different and on a different scale. Commentary is no longer separated from news, and that commentary is all clearly intended to support the government line. There is little pluralism of views. Even when PiS last controlled TVP, Tomasz Lis, now editor of PiS-hostile Newsweek Polska, had his own current affairs show at the station, something which would now be inconceivable.

Building a real public service broadcaster anew

Despite the internet and changing viewing habits , public service broadcasting can and should play an important role in Poland. It is uniquely mandated to provide universally accessible, trusted news, to educate and entertain all demographics with high-quality programming in a way commercial television often does not.

But for many Poles today, there seems little point in discussing reform of TVP to make that a reality. Why tackle an old problem that is evidently unsolvable? PO, now the main opposition party, have talked of scrapping TVP’s news channel, yet have not presented ideas on how the broadcaster as a whole could be depoliticised.

In the same 2020 interview mentioned above, even Duda said he regrets “that experts don’t sit down and propose a way to reform public broadcasting”, as if there was no way forward. Except they have and there is.

The Citizens Proposal for media reform was born at the 2009 Congress of Culture in Kraków. A working group of journalists, media experts and artists set out to tackle how to separate TVP from politics and ensure stable financing.

They proposed that leadership positions at TVP should be chosen by a representative body of civil society, academics and journalists, totally separate from politics. The failing licence fee would be replaced an audio-visual payment payable by all and advertising limited.

Despite endorsing the principles of the whole proposal, PO, at the time the ruling party, ultimately sidelined the issue in its whole time in office. PiS promised to at least introduce the audio-visual payment, but instead massively raised state subsidies increasing dependence on the state and reduced the powers of KRRiT, a move which was ruled to have been unconstitutional.

Nothing will change until there is a new government, but the basic ideas for media reform do exist.

For inspiration, Poles can look eastwards to their neighbour Ukraine, where, following the Euro-Maidan Revolution of 2013-14, reformers set out to transform the national broadcaster, which had been similarly subservient to the state.

With support from western donors and international experts from the BBC and Deutsche Welle, the broadcaster, newly renamed “Suspilne” (Public), underwent a colossal restructuring. Wasteful spending was cut, transparent competition was introduced for managerial positions, and a new supervisory board, combining representatives from parliament and NGOs (who are in the majority), now ensures independent oversight.

In 2021, an important milestone was passed when both the supervisory board and director were newly elected after the first full term ended and remained independent of the ruling party. After investing in professional quality programming (especially investigative journalism) and establishing a new culture of editorial independence, Suspilne is now the most trusted television news source in Ukraine (whereas TVP is the least-trusted major outlet in Poland).

An example of change is the extensive coverage given to President Zelensky’s offshore accounts as part of the recent Pandora Papers – something which would have been unthinkable in earlier years.

The biggest criticism of Suspilne is how small its audience share is. Its disadvantage was being launched when oligarch-owned channels with far greater resources already dominated the market. But this should not be a problem in Poland, where TVP still has a significant audience.

The way TVP has been transformed under PiS should have proved to the majority of Poles beyond any doubt the need to finally reform Poland’s national broadcaster. Ideas for how to do this already exist, and there is evidence that such a transformation can be successful.

What is unsure is whether there will be political will when the opportunity comes – or if the next government will again see state television as “electoral loot”.

Main image credit: Michal Ryniak / Agencja Gazeta

Janek Lasocki was formerly advocacy coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations and currently writes about Eastern Europe and the former USSR. His work has been published by Open Democracy, the Atlantic Council and Newsweek. He tweets at @janeklasocki.