Polish state TV demands news outlet remove leaked film criticising PM Tusk

Jun 13, 2024 | Media, Politics

Polish state broadcaster TVP has demanded that a private media outlet take down a leaked copy of a film criticising Prime Minister Donald Tusk that was made, but never broadcast, under the station’s former management when Tusk was in opposition.

On Tuesday, news website Goniec announced that it had come into possession of an almost-final version of the film, which had allegedly been produced at a cost of hundreds of thousands of zloty on the orders of TVP’s former CEO Jacek Kurski in 2018 (a claim Kurski denies).

It published a copy of the film, though by Thursday morning, YouTube, on which the video was published, showed that it had been taken down due to copyright claims by TVP.

Under the Law and Justice (PiS) government that ruled Poland between 2015 and 2023, TVP was turned into a propaganda mouthpiece for the ruling party, used to promote its policies and attack the opposition. Tusk, PiS’s most prominent opponent, was a particular target.

Goniec says that the film it has obtained was never broadcast because it “turned out to be too stupid or kitschy even for TVP standards”. It says that it has published the material without the permission of TVP – which is now under new management appointed by Tusk’s government – “because the public interest requires it”.

“The public has the right to know how public money was wasted and how a public institution was harnessed in the service of propaganda,” wrote Goniec.

The film, which had the working title Król Europy (King of Europe) was prepared in anticipation of Tusk’s return to domestic politics after his term as president of the European Council ended in 2019. The aim of the programme was to portray him as a “German puppet”, reports Goniec.

“We were clearly told that money was not an issue,” Piotr Kania, a senior TVP employee at the time, told Goniec. “The most important thing was for the film to be…a strong attack on Tusk. The only thing that mattered was to disgust TVP viewers regarding Tusk and to broadcast it at the moment of his return to politics.”

The 51-minute version of the film obtained by Goniec contains a variety of PiS politicians and conservative commentators discussing Tusk and his background in a manner intended to portray him as more German than Polish and as working against Poland’s interests. One talking head calls him a “traitor”.

It also downplays his role in the anti-communist Solidarity movement of the 1980s and suggests he had links to the communist-era security services. There are also suggestions that Tusk, in his first stint as prime minister, was responsible for the death of President Lech Kaczyński in the 2010 Smolensk air disaster.

The current management of TVP reacted angrily to Goniec’s decision to publish the film and demanded that the website take it down. Goniec’s editor-in-chief, Janusz Schwertner, said the website had received a letter from TVP outlining its demands.

“The film in question violates all journalistic standards of the civilised world, which is why even the cynical propagandist Jacek Kurski and his collaborators at that time did not decide to broadcast it on TVP,” the station’s general director, Tomasz Sygut, told news website Onet.

“Publishing lies and slander invented for the purposes of aggressive political propaganda is never in the public interest,” he added.

When Tusk came to power in December, he promised to “depoliticise” public broadcasters and immediately launched a controversial move to retake control of them and remove PiS influence. However, since then TVP has been accused of instead showing bias towards the new government.

Following Goniec’s publication of the film, Kurski himself – who last week unsuccessfully stood as a candidate for PiS in the European elections – also commented.

In a statement on X, Kurski said it was “untrue” that he had been involved in the production of the film about Tusk and added that he had never even seen a copy of it. He said that it was the work of director Ewa Świecińska and that clearly “the challenge was too much for [her]”.

“I guess that after the development stage of the film, the agency’s director simply decided that the project was not promising and therefore it was abandoned,” he added.

Kurski also suggested that Goniec’s publication of the film was an act of “revenge” by Kania, who had been “fired from TVP for a number of violations of norms and standards”.


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