Members of the Polish state TV board submit complaint over its “biased” coverage of opposition march

Five of the 15 members of state broadcaster TVP’s oversight board have called for the broadcasting regulator (KRRiT) to take action against the station for its coverage of Sunday’s anti-government protests, which they say was “extremely unreliable and biased”.

Like other public media, TVP has been under the influence of the ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party since it came to power in 2015. During that time, the station has been turned into a government mouthpiece, including regularly attacking the opposition.

Ahead of Sunday’s demonstration, TVP’s news coverage regularly described it as a “march of hate”. On the day itself, despite hundreds of thousands attending Poland’s largest protests since at least 2020, TVP provided limited coverage. By contrast, Poland’s two main private broadcasters featured extensive live reporting.

In response, five members of TVP’s programme council – three journalists, Krzysztof Luft (a former opposition election candidate), Artur Andrysiak, Janusz Daszczyński, and two opposition politicians, Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus and Iwona Śledzińska-Katarasinska – submitted a complaint to the KRRiT.

They say that TVP portrayed an event that was “peaceful, joyful”, though also “obviously full of political emotion [and] mobilising voters to vote for the opposition”, as a “hate march” that was “calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government”.

In one segment, a TVP reporter deliberately sought out protest participants shouting vulgar slogans, and even encouraged them to do so, with the aim of showing the protesters “as a group of aggressive and rude primitives”, say the complainants.

They also point out that, while all other Polish TV stations, as well as some international broadcasters such as the BBC, began their newscasts with information about the march, TVP only showed footage of the event in the 11th and 25th minute of its main evening news show, Wiadomości.

This “aimed at diminishing its significance”, said the council members. But “above all, the way yesterday’s march was reported by both Wiadomości and [news channel] TVP Info was an ostentatious denial of fairness and impartiality”.

This, they say, violated the obligation to provide reliable reporting under Poland’s Broadcasting Act. They therefore called on the KRRiT’s chairman, Maciej Świrski, to initiate action against the broadcaster.

“In view of the beginning of the election campaign, the matter is particularly important and urgent,” they added, referring to parliamentary elections this autumn at which PiS is seeking to win an unprecedented third term in office.

Following Poland’s last two elections in 2019 and 2020, OSCE observers reported concerns that TVP had “acted as a campaign vehicle for the incumbent”, with a “lack of impartiality…[that] undermined voters’ ability to make an informed choice…[and] amplified the advantage of the ruling party”.

PiS argues, however, that the changes at TVP are part of a necessary re-balancing of the media landscape, which was previously dominated by liberal and leftist outlets. Its supporters note that public media in Poland have always been under the influence of whichever parties are in power.

However, since PiS took office, public trust in TVP has fallen to its lowest recorded level, according to state research agency CBOS. The channel is now Poles’ least trusted major source of news, according to an annual study by researchers at the University of Oxford.

Main image credit: TVP screenshot

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.