Public media carried out “systematic repression of civil society” under former government, finds report

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland’s public media “carried out systematic repressive and defamatory actions against activists, non-governmental organisations, and civil society” during the rule of the former Law and Justice (PiS) government from 2015 to 2023, a new report has found.

The findings were made by a special commission established in April by Poland’s justice and interior ministries to look into cases of abuse of power against civil society under the former PiS government.

After presenting its report, the commission announced that it is planning to send the material it has compiled to prosecutors for assessment as to whether there are grounds for initiating criminal proceedings against those responsible for the alleged abuses.

When the national-conservative PiS party was in power, public media outlets – which have a statutory obligation to be neutral – were brought under an unprecedented level of political control, with even news broadcasts being used to praise the government and attack its opponents, including civil-society groups.

Sylwia Gregorczyk-Abram, the head of the commission – which sifted through hundreds of hours of recordings from state broadcasters TVP and Polskie Radio, as well as material from the Polish Press Agency (PAP) – said that the outlets deployed “well-thought-out strategies of repression aimed at silencing and destabilising social resistance”.

One of the issues highlighted in the 374-page report was the selection of guests. For example, of 61 guests invited by Polskie Radio to comment on efforts to tighten the abortion law in 2016 and 2020 – and the mass protests against them – 55 presented anti-abortion views. Many of them were PiS politicians.

Meanwhile, no pro-choice activists were invited to present their arguments or engage in any kind of debate with their opponents.

“The hosts knew that they were inviting commentators who are reluctant to discuss women’s rights and their freedom of choice,” the authors of the report note.

Another of the issues presented was the complete omission by TVP of certain topics, such as the suicide of Piotr Szczęsny, who died in 2017 after setting himself on fire in the centre of Warsaw in protest against the PiS government.

His death was major news in private media outlets, some of which also covered demonstrations organised to mark subsequent anniversaries of his death. But the commission’s report notes that in all the TVP material it examined from 2017 to 2023, Szczęsny was not mentioned at all.

The authors of the report also pointed out that state broadcasters’ materials manipulated emotions, presenting commentary as facts and presenting certain groups as “villains”.

For example, at a time when the PiS government was mounting a vocal campaign against what it called “LGBT ideology”, public broadcasters echoed this through coverage intended to “vilify” LGBT+ people and “cause moral panic related to the presence of LGBT+ people in public spaces”.

That included TVP broadcasting, days before parliamentary elections in 2019, a documentary, Invasion (Inwazja), in which it claimed links between the LGBT+ community and paedophilia.

In 2022, a Warsaw court ruled that TVP had violated the personal rights of LGBT+ people by broadcasting Invasion and ordered an apology, a fine of 35,000 zloty, and banned any further distribution of the film.

“Instead of siding with citizens, the media launched a smear campaign against civil society,” Gregorczyk-Abram told Polskie Radio, which is now under new management, controversially installed by the current government after it took office in December 2023.

“They ridiculed, discredited and destroyed social movements and any form of activity that did not fit into the political narrative of the government at the time.”

Her commission’s report also criticised the state media regulator, the National Broadcasting Council (KRRiT), for inaction in the face of these violations of ethical and legal standards in state media.

The report notes that nominations to KRRiT for the 2016-2022 term included only individuals recommended by PiS, bringing the body effectively under the party’s control.

These “personnel changes had real and systemic consequences in terms of limiting the council’s independence, weakening control over public media, and intensifying supervision of independent media”, wrote the authors.

The commission’s findings were welcomed by justice minister Waldermar Żurek, who, when PiS was in power, was a judge who actively opposed its judicial reforms.

“Between 2015 and 2023, thousands of us stood up for democracy, the rule of law and human rights,” said Żurek at a presentation of the new report. “During this period, instead of siding with civil society, public media regularly attacked it and waged a campaign of hatred, spreading misinformation and disparaging the role of activists.”

However, Jolanta Hajdasz, president of the Association of Polish Journalists (SDP), a conservative group, told Catholic broadcaster Radio Maryja that the report was created “in a biased manner”, omitting some facts and presenting others only partially.

“This has nothing to do with a fair assessment of what was happening in the public media during this period,” said Hajdasz. “Absolutely everything is criticised from the perspective of the LGBT agenda and the groups that support this agenda.”

A variety of polling – including by the Polish state research agency CBOS, private pollster SW Research, and the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford – has previously found overwhelmingly negative views of TVP during PiS’s time in power.

When the current, more liberal ruling coalition, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, came to power in December 2023, it pledged that “depoliticising” state media was one of its priorities.

It immediately moved to take control of public media outlets and replace their leadership in a series of controversial and legally contested moves.

However, since then, many observers have argued that the government has simply shifted public media’s bias in its own favour. A report last year by Demagog, an independent fact-checking platform, found a clear bias at TVP in favour of Tusk’s ruling coalition.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Ministerstwo Sprawiedliwośći (under (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

Agnieszka Wądołowska

Agnieszka Wądołowska is deputy editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. She is a member of the European Press Prize’s preparatory committee. She was 2022 Fellow at the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at City University of New York. In 2024, she graduated from the Advanced Leadership Programme for Top Talents at the Center for Leadership. She has previously contributed to Gazeta Wyborcza, Wysokie Obcasy and Duży Format.