The clocks went back to the pre-glasnost era for Pawel Pietkun last month as the veteran foreign correspondent turned up to find black-clad police officers barring his way into work at the state-funded broadcasting channel TVP World’s headquarters in central Warsaw.
Serving as deputy director of the influential foreign affairs channel which functions as the Polish equivalent of the BBC World Service, Pietkun was just one of the 200 TVP World staff forcibly locked out of their workplace—in a supposedly buoyant liberal democracy—at the behest of Poland’s new Tusk government, in an eerie throwback to an era of Soviet domination.
Speaking to The European Conservative, Pietkun describes the difficult situation in which the media battle has placed individual staff members, himself included. While they technically still receive a salary and operate under their previous contracts, each faces an uncertain future both at the network and in journalism more generally.
“Journalism in Poland desperately needs help, am I am not speaking as a former TVP journalist,” he said, calling the situation more similar to that in Iran than a developed Western democracy: “If you live in a country where government can put police into your building that can stop your activities, then you do not have a free press”.
Due to his senior rank at the station, Pietkun fully expected to be fired following the handover of power to the new Tusk administration. However, he was surprised at the extent of the purge across all levels, from technical staff to reporters.
According to Pietkun, the new Ministry for Culture was at first intentionally vague regarding TVP’s post-election future before appointing a relatively unknown governing body. Then followed three sudden emails, stating that he and the rest of the staff at the station were to be locked out of the station’s premises as the entire TVP network was to be placed into liquidation.
The station effectively ceased functioning three days before Christmas with the timing of the shutdown no coincidence. Pietkun noted that it occurred at a time occurring when most staff were focused on the holiday period rather than imminent threats from the new regime.
Pietkun defends TVP’s reporting and denies any and all reporting bias. He says that TVP World specifically dealt with international news, including coverage of the war in Ukraine, and almost avoided domestic Polish politics entirely. To him, TVP World was no more a propaganda wing of the former governing party Law and Justice (PiS) than the BBC is of the British government.
In the aftermath of the purge, Pietkun outlines how some Poles have turned to alternative channels such as TV Republika; however, being in the Polish media ecosystem requires at least partial cooperation with the ruling government in Warsaw.
After a narrow victory for a loose coalition of progressive parties last October, Polish liberals have been steaming ahead with an institutional purge of elements supposedly loyal to the previous PiS administration with the broader TVP network seen by the new government as a major stronghold of conservative rule.
The crisis at TVP has engulfed the entirety of Polish politics since late December with an attempted sitdown protest against the moves at TVP headquarters met with an aggressive police presence shortly before Christmas as normally vocal anti-PiS human rights organisations stay mainly silent about the authoritarian tendencies of the new Tusk administration.
As for PiS’s preparedness for the media assault, Pietkun points out that, like the rest of the TVP family, the former government was relatively unprepared for the pace of attack from the new coalition and also says that the chaos at TVP has been welcomed by Kremlin news sites.
The new Tusk-appointed TVP director is currently in a war of words with the old board as the legitimacy crisis at the station drags on with a review set to get underway of all those given employment at the network during the PiS era.
In a statement to The European Conservative, PiS spokesman Rafał Bochenek pointed to the illegality of the Tusk government’s campaign against TVP as well as the relative silence from the EU itself, after formerly hounding the PiS administration for consolidating the media.
“It is unprecedented that one Polish politician has such influence on the media in a democratic Poland,” Bochenek decried, pointing to the specific role of Culture Minister Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, a keen Tusk loyalist, in the affair.
He goes on to say “after complaining about the rule of law allegedly being broken, the EU has not acted when the rule of law clearly has been violated. The world can now see the double standards the EU practices.”
While PiS is still in de facto control of the Polish presidency and remains the largest party in Poland, even though it was unable to form a government coalition, the TVP clampdown is seen as an existential crisis for the party following years of gradual liberal takeover of the mainstream media.
Both PiS and axed TVP staff plan on holding a rally against the purge January 11th in Warsaw as the new Tusk government continues its thawing of relations with the European Commission. Whether the events at the TVP headquarters is just the precursor of a wider and even more extensive purge by the new Tusk government awaits to be seen.
