The Political Division caused by manipulated media in Poland

Violence, hate, division – these are factors that, for over a decade, have shaped Polish politics. Many of these problems can be traced back to the 2015 parliamentary elections and the Law and Justice Party (PiS) rise under Beata Szydło’s government, which was a turning point for Poland’s political and media landscape.

One person who is responsible for the most damage created to the free public media in Poland is Jacek Kurski. He is a party politician who served as an MEP and a member of PiS. He was placed into the role as the President of the Management Board of Polish Television (TVP) in August 2016, after the far-right nationalistic party PiS won the General election one year earlier.

Over the eight years PiS was in power, Kurski has rebuilt the Polish state-owned media, from a free and independent press into a partisan platform. Under his term as president of the TVP, the language got more hostile against opposition politicians, calling and framing them as “anti-Polish” or “foreign-controlled”. Moreover, ideological hate campaigns against the LGBTQ+ movement and Refugees were created, depicting those groups as a “threat to the traditional, catholic values” or were framed as “dangerous outsiders”.

These lies and manipulations had a substantial effect on the Polish people, who, after eight years of PiS’s “reign” in Poland, have started to believe in those lies that Kurski’s TVP was spreading. Therefore, this made Kurski one of the most essential tools for the PiS government. Some see Kurski as a “pioneer” of “traditional values”. In contrast, the other half sees him as a corrupt man who has divided the country through the party-indoctrination spread in his TVP.

However, the populism spread by Kurski’s TVP has also caused violence. The arguably most tragic incident of politically motivated murder in the History of the 3^rd  Polish Republic was the stabbing of the late mayor of Gdansk, Paweł Adamowicz, on January 13^th 2019, during a charity concert in Gdansk. Months before his death, Adamowicz faced intense verbal hostility, most prominently from the TVP. This highlighted that Poland became more toxic, not only in words, but also in actions, as seen on the 13^th of January 2019. This can be firmly attributed to the TVP and their hate speech propaganda, implanted by Kurski and the PiS Party leadership.

This Blog highlights that state-controlled media can drastically influence a country’s political landscape. When political parties seek power by any means, division grows. In the worst case, aggressive language can cause violence and death. After the PiS got voted out of office on the 15^th of October 2023, Tusk’s government is trying to rebuild the independent broadcaster the TVP once was, however, those efforts weren’t strong enough, so occasionally there still is a political bias in the coverage.

Konrad Leutert