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With the acquisition of the newspaper group Polska Press, the ruling Law and Justice party, PIS, further expands its control over the media industry. Five years ago, the PIS government took over Poland’s public service, television and radio, sacked all independent journalists and managers and replaced them with officials loyal to the party.
But the media landscape was it continued in a pluralistic way, with a series of private actors who did not follow the orders of the nationalist government. Now the PIS government takes over. The method is to allow state oil company Orlen to buy the large group of private newspapers from German owner Verlagsgruppe Passau Capital Group.
It’s a big problem: the company includes 20 of the 24 regional newspapers in Poland with a total of 17 million readers, as well as 120 local weekly newspapers.
Orlen manager Daniel Obajtek said Monday that the oil company is thus expanding its business opportunities. No one takes that statement more seriously. Obajtek has been appointed by the government and the acquisition will be carried out by direct order of the leader of the PIS party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
That the PIS was seeking to seize control of the independent media became clear already after this summer’s presidential elections, when PIS candidate Andrzej Duda barely beat liberal challenger Rafal Trzaskowski.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, The PIS leader explained that the party needs to change the situation in the media: “We do not want decisions to be made anywhere outside the borders of Poland. The country’s authorities cannot agree that part of the national nervous system is in foreign hands ”.
Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, a key figure in the PIS-led government, already several years ago turned the public service media, television and radio, into reliable government megaphones: in the election campaign, they obediently praised Duda and they slandered Trzaskowski. In the same way, he oppressed the courts, which became organs of political parties.
But Ziobro and Kaczynski also wanted to avoid journalistic competition from independent newspapers and television channels that publish material critical of the government. How they would proceed, they pondered for a long time. Since several of the private television and newspaper companies are partly foreign-owned, they considered legislation prohibiting foreign ownership. However, it turned out that PIS had a problem: it is against EU law to prohibit ownership of foreign media. So the method of promoting a “polonization” of the media became an acquisition.
After the state media, television and radio, it is now the turn of the private media to become propaganda megaphones for the PIS government. The first reactions refer to “a black day for press freedom in Poland”.
“PIS follows Putin’s path. First it was the courts, then the media and self-government. Kaczynski’s power is still dead, but it can destroy local media,” writes Marcin Bosacki, senator of the Liberal Citizen Platform (PO ) On twitter.
The acquisition is probably just a first step. There are more foreign-owned companies: the Onet portal, which has Swiss-German-American owners, and the newspaper Newsweek, and the television channel TVN, owned by the German Bauer Media, will soon be next.
