Chief of Poland’s National Broadcasting Council has criticised Communist-era style practices as Eurocrat globalist Donald Tusk returns to power and immediately starts purging the national media landscape.
Donald Tusk, the two-time Polish Prime Minister and Brussels Eurocrat has heralded his return to power in the country after this year’s elections by steps to break up media organisations that some see as holding views contrary to his own. The Civic Platform leader accused several broadcasters including the state broadcaster TVP as being propagandists and said he would defending the “legal order” and “independence” by taking them down.
British state broadcaster the BBC has dutifully toed the Tusk line, uncritically reported claims as fact that TVP “became a propaganda machine for the [Law and Justice (PiS)] government”. ABC News reported Tusk was seeking to “reestablish independent media in Poland in a legally binding and lasting way”. Meanwhile, Politico stated “Poland’s revolution gets real as government reclaims control of public media”
The new Polish culture ministry announced Wednesday it had fired the heads of several broadcasters. The management and supervisory boards of Televison Poland, Polish Radio, and the Polish Press Agency were all dismissed.
A report from last month previewing the planned purge of Polish media by the incoming Tusk government noted he boasted he would be able to make the changes he wanted in “24 hours”, but also highlighted concern from one senior Polish media figure who while agreeing that the media landscape needed improving, also said it was likely Tusk would merely use this time to create his own state propaganda vehicle, rather than destroy it.
Police were seen entering the headquarters of TVP on Wednesday, and the broadcaster was taken off air, the output of a substitute channel being broadcast instead to Polish televisions.
Members of the outgoing Law and Justice (PiS) party, who ruled Poland for the past eight years, attempted to protest the strike by the new government and hosted a protest sit-in at TVP overnight and abstained on the new “impartiality and reliability of public media” law vote, but nevertheless, the takedown went ahead.
Maciej Świrski, head of the National Broadcasting Council of Poland has criticised the strike against broadcasters by the new government, decrying it as “an act of lawlessness” and reminiscent of the Communist-era crackdowns the country once knew. He is reported as having said: “As the Chairman of the National Broadcasting Council, I state that the dismissal of the Management Boards and Supervisory Boards of public media by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage is a gross violation of the law.
“Shutting down the television signal and websites of [TVPInfo] is an act of lawlessness and recalls the worst times of martial law”. Members of the Council said in a separate statement that the dismissals were contrary to the law and normal procedure, while the new government insists as a 100 per cent shareholder in the state broadcasters, it has every right to act as it pleases.
As previously reported the purge of media is not the only facet of the incoming government’s de-conservatisation of Poland, with moves to remove the nation’s most senior judge in progress, as well as a campaign of replacing museum and publishing house bosses.
Poland had nationwide elections in October. While Mateusz Morawiecki’s national-conservative PiS emerged again as the largest party, it did not gain enough seats to govern alone and the globalist-Eurocrat Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition was able to form a coalition with the Third Way party and the New Left party and form a government.
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