Poland’s media battle gets political
Calls for Poles to tone down political rhetoric in the wake of the murder of Gdańsk Mayor Paweł Adamowicz didn’t last more than a few days.
The latest battleground is over TVP, Polish state television that is under the firm control of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.
TVP unleashed a series of vitriolic attacks against Adamowicz last year ahead of a regional election, when he was facing off against a PiS candidate. Newton Media, a monitoring company, found Adamowicz was mentioned 1,773 times by TVP channels in 2018 — about five times a day — and most of those were negative — accusing him of corruption, favoring Nazis and welcoming Muslim migrants to his city.
In the wake of his death, a TVP report on political hate speech quoted only examples from opposition politicians, not from Law and Justice — for which the channel received brickbats from across the political spectrum. The channel has also filed lawsuits against commentators who linked its earlier coverage to Adamowicz’s death.
Last week, a group of protesters outside TVP’s Warsaw studio surrounded the car of Magdalena Ogórek, a former presidential candidate for the ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance who has become a fervent media advocate of Law and Justice.