Politicizing Poland’s Public Service Media: The Analysis of Wiadomości News Program

Abstract

This study explores the tensions between the mission and pluralism of the media versus the participation of the public service media (PSM) in government propaganda in Poland. We present the results of the hybrid qualitative-quantitative content analysis of the propaganda techniques used in Wiadomości – the main public TVP1 news program. Two weekly blocks of news were analyzed. The first was randomly selected from 2015-2020. The second was subsequently chosen for the same seven days, two years later. We assumed that this chronological difference would reveal changes in narration and propaganda used in the news. The analysis refers to the mission of PSM, as defined by the law in the Broadcasting Act (1992). The changes that occurred after 2015 were also the result of new legal regulations and personnel changes. The conclusions confirm that the news from the PSM is controlled and manipulated by the government.

The Commercialisation of Propaganda and the Independence of the Fourth Estate – a Contribution to the Discussion on Contemporary Threats to Media Freedom

“…Some see the actions on the media market in Poland as the same scenario as in Hungary. These include actions such as the transformation of public media into so-called national media (Skrzypczak, 2015;Węglińska, Szurmiński, Wąsicka-Sroczyńska, 2021;Gajlewicz-Korab, Szurmiński, 2022;Skrzypczak, Iwasiuta, 2021), the announcement of new taxes on digital advertising in 2021 (Wojtas, 2021) -which resulted in a solidarity protest of all private media, the attempt to enact the so-called "Lex TVN" (Skrzypczak, 2021, pp. 3-30), and finally the purchase by the state-owned oil company Orlen of the Polska Press media group, comprising more than 20 regional dailies, 1 the free daily Naszemiasto.pl and around 500 local websites, Naszemiasto.pl and the portals of individual press titles.…”