Proportion of Poles who trust public media rises but remains a minority

Sep 23, 2025 | Media

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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.

Trust in Poland’s public media has risen for the second year running following the 2023 change in government. However, the proportion of Poles who trust public media is still far outweighed by those who distrust it

New polling by IBRiS for the Polish Press Agency (PAP) found that 35% now trust public media, up from 31% last year and a record low of 25% in 2023. Meanwhile, distrust now stands at 48%, down from 62% two years ago.

“Society is still deeply polarised,” wrote IBRiS, quoted by news website Onet. “Public media continue to grapple with a legacy of deep divisions. Their trust is fragile and deeply divided, which makes it difficult for them to rebuild their position as a universal source of information.”

Poland’s state-owned media have been at the heart of a political struggle over the last decade. They were brought under unprecedented political control by the former national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government, which ruled between 2015 and 2023.

During that time, public broadcasters – in particular television station TVP – became a mouthpiece for the ruling party, producing news coverage and other programming that praised the government and attacked its opponents.

A variety of polling – including by Polish state research agency CBOS, private pollster SW Research, and the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford – has 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.

In its latest polling, IBRiS also found that trust in private media had risen from 39.3% last year to 51.3% now, which is the highest figure recorded since it began such surveys in 2016. Distrust in private media fell from 18.1% to 5.2%.

“The rebound in trust in private media may be a reaction to the changing political landscape and society’s expectations for objectivity and independence,” says Kamil Smogorzewski, communications director at IBRiS.

“Poles, tired of polarisation, are looking for sources of information they perceive as more balanced and professional,” he added.

Meanwhile, only 30.4% of Poles trust social media and 55.5% distrust it – figures not dissimilar to the level of trust and distrust in public media.


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: Daniel Kruczynski/Flickr (under CC BY-SA 2.0)

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