Polish TV viewers were treated to a strange sight on their screens on Wednesday, December 20. In the morning, the public 24-hour news channel TVP Info suddenly stopped broadcasting. Its journalists tried to take refuge on the live YouTube platform, only to disappear again in the afternoon. Its website was suspended in the morning, but on the evening of December 20, it was linked to the parent company’s portal: TVP.pl. The programs of the other public service channels were also disrupted, and their newscasts were not broadcast. In place of the 7:30 pm news on TVP 1, a new presenter announced the return of a news bulletin from Thursday, December 21, which would reflect a more authentic "snapshot" of events, unlike "the one that has been painted in these studios for eight years, using purposely selected colors."
The right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, in power in Warsaw between 2015 and 2023, had rushed to get their hands on public broadcasting, transforming public television into a blatant mouthpiece for government action and a machine for slandering the opposition, who were of course never invited into the studio to defend themselves. Back in October 2020, when the tightening of Poland’s abortion law drove tens of thousands of demonstrators into the streets, TVP headlined one of its news banners: "Left-wing fascism destroys Poland."
Minutes before TVP Info disappeared from the screens, the newly appointed Ministry of Culture announced in a press release that it had fired the chairpersons from all the boards of public television and radio stations, as well as the chairperson of the Polish Press Agency (PAP), and replaced them with new bosses. The ministry justified its action by citing a resolution passed the previous day by the Lower House. The Lower House, dominated by members of the pro-European Civic Coalition that had emerged victorious from the October elections, had on December 19 declared "there is an urgent need to start the process of restoring the constitutional order in the area of citizens’ access to reliable information and the functioning of the public media, and in the area of independence, objectivity and pluralism."
Donald Tusk, who was inaugurated as prime minister on December 13, had never made any secret of his desire to put an end to the propaganda of public broadcasting, and it was rumored that this would be done before Christmas. "We will need exactly 24 hours to turn the PiS TV back into public TV. Take my word for it," he promised at an election rally in early October. In the end, a week was all it took for his coalition government to take over the case, using a legal void in company law.
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