Polish opposition leader Donald Tusk last month offered to stop instructing his candidates to stay away from journalists from state-controlled outlets.
It was a rare olive branch extended in a partisan media landscape reaching fever pitch ahead of elections on Sunday. But it quickly backfired.
As Tusk was speaking, a journalist from TVP state television interrupted his news conference, shouting a question about Tusk’s alleged ties to Russia and Germany — a favourite campaign topic for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Tusk’s Civic Platform took this as yet another example of how PiS has turned TVP into its mouthpiece, peddling a caricature of the opposition leader as a stooge of foreign powers, trapped in an anti-Polish Bermuda Triangle between Brussels, Berlin and Moscow.
“Imagine the BBC taken over by Breitbart and you are getting an inkling of the tsunami of Goebbelsian propaganda that spurts forth 24/7 from state-controlled media,” said Civic Platform lawmaker Radosław Sikorski.
While TVP is little watched in Warsaw and other big cities where voters tend to back the opposition, it remains the main source of information for many countryside voters who are the core electorate of PiS.
Tusk has faced personal attacks propagated by TVP, including over his Polish identity because his grandmother was German.
If the opposition wins on Sunday, “we will need exactly 24 hours for the PiS government television to turn into public television”, Tusk promised recently. And once TVP “becomes truly public, it will devote a lot of time to telling the truth about PiS’s rule”, he added.
Tusk’s criticisms of TVP are widely shared by Brussels and Washington.
Meanwhile, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which is a shareholder in the Polish state-controlled energy company Orlen, has voiced concerns over the company’s foray into media. Orlen acquired Polska Press, the country’s largest distributor of regional newspapers, in 2020.
Pro-government newspapers are sold at Orlen’s petrol stations, while opposition-friendly media bosses accuse the company of cancelling advertising contracts. Some Orlen-controlled publications also refused to run campaign ads from two smaller opposition parties, citing their “leftwing values”.
In the opposition camp, TVN, a private station owned by US broadcaster Discovery, has come under PiS pressure and this month sued the country’s national broadcasting council for delaying the renewal of its licence by almost a year. A government-sponsored media law that could have forced Discovery to sell TVN was only narrowly averted in 2021 after strong lobbying by Washington.
Should foreign media investors abandon Poland, it could have “a devastating impact on media pluralism“, according to a report this month from the Media Freedom Rapid Response, a consortium that monitors European media.
For now, Polish viewers live in parallel worlds shaped by contradictory media reports.
TVN and opposition newspapers recently headlined with Tusk proclaiming that more than 1mn supporters joined his rally in Warsaw, while TVP focused on a smaller PiS event in Katowice and reported that only 100,000 people marched in Warsaw.
The opposition has resorted to dirty tricks too. A recent Civic Platform video, purportedly of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, turned out to be a deepfake, featuring technology-altered words about a fallout between PiS and its current coalition partner. The video was later pulled down, after it received strong criticism on social media.
Poland’s campaign was “just bloody”, said Marcin Duma, who runs pollster Ibris. “It’s astonishing what has happened to the language and the negative emotions used on both sides.”
Propaganda has been facilitated by out-of-date legislation, experts say.
“Our Polish media laws are mostly over 20 years old, so there are just no regulations to stop and punish parties that use artificial intelligence,” said Paweł Nowacki, a media consultant and former journalist.
While some journalists are feeding the polarisation, others are caught in the crossfire.
In August, journalist Marcin Meller was invited to chair a panel at a Civic Platform youth conference. But the organisers then asked Meller to remove one of his guests, Grzegorz Sroczyński, seen to be too much of a “symmetrist”, meaning that he is neither for PiS nor for Civic Platform.
Meller refused to withdraw Sroczyński, so his panel got scrapped. “If you don’t provide them with the political pornography they want, they start saying you are ‘symmetrising’. If you write that reality is not black and white, they start attacking you,” Sroczyński said.
Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, compared the toxicity of this campaign to the emotionally charged election that sealed the Solidarity movement’s victory over the Communist party. “Right now the narrative is far more poisonous than in 1989,” he said.
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