Eurasia Press & News
The proposed new advertising tax that prompted a blackout protest represents “just the tip of the iceberg” in government pressure on the independent media, according to the authors of a new report on media freedom in Poland.
Up until this week, those concerned about media freedom in Poland could at least console themselves with the thought, “at least it’s not as bad as in Hungary”. And it’s not: citizens can still access a number of news portals, newspapers or TV channels that are ready to hold the government to account. Yet, on Wednesday, those independent outlets all took part in a blackout protest meant to alert both domestic audiences and the outside world to the fact that the clock is ticking on media freedom in Poland.
The one-day break in broadcasting, black front pages of newspapers and black home pages of news portals were meant to warn everyone of how the media would look once the nationalist-populist government led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party completes its mission to kill off the independent media.
The immediate target of the protest was a new tax on advertising planned by the government, but the push-back has been so strong because the move is widely understood to be just the latest in a more general assault on media freedom since PiS came to power.
The stark warning was necessary. PiS has not – so far – passed a far-reaching law calling for the “re-polonisation” and “deconcentraton” of the media sector that it has threatened (such a law would involve reducing the share of permitted foreign ownership or limiting the number of outlets a company can own, thus severely weakening the most influential critical media in Poland); instead, it has been taking numerous smaller measures which, little by little, have amounted to a serious threat to media freedom.
“Death by a thousand cuts” is how one anonymous Polish journalist put it in an interview with the authors of a new International Press Institute (IPI) analysis on the state of media freedom in Poland, released a day after the blackout protest.
IPI, a Vienna-based NGO that monitors, promotes and protects media freedom, based its report, “Democracy Declining: Erosion of Media Freedom in Poland”, on dozens of interviews with journalists, NGOs and diplomats, and patches together all the measures taken so far by PiS against the independent media, painting an alarming overall picture.
“Over the last five years, PiS has engaged in a calculated cherry-picking exercise, carefully selecting parts of the model of media capture that have been effective in Hungary, and then finding workarounds for those that do not fit the Polish system,” Jamie Wiseman, an advocacy officer at IPI, tells BIRN.
“This policy of death by a thousand cuts means that on their own, these measures have been scattered enough to avoid further battles with Brussels over the rule of law. Taken together, they amount to a concerted campaign of administrative pressure aimed at destabilising critical media businesses and a direct attack on press freedom,” he says.
Little by little
When it came to power in 2015, PiS notoriously took full control of the state-owned media, turning the state broadcaster especially into a shameless propaganda machine for the party and government.
The next step was diverting state advertising away from independent media and towards the right-wing media supportive of the government, despite the latter’s much lower circulation numbers. According to the IPI report, liberal titles like Polityka and Newsweek Polska have seen revenue from state advertising drop by 98-100 per cent since 2015. PiS-friendly media were also able to access generous government grants.
In parallel, IPI reports, PiS and its allies have been engaging in “legal harassment” against critical media. Gazeta Wyborcza, PiS’s media nemesis, is facing over 50 separate lawsuits as well as numerous pre-litigation requests.
And then there’s what IPI calls “a coordinated and concerted campaign of administrative pressures”, which include antimonopoly investigations to block unfavoured mergers, licensing changes, and the use of retroactive tax penalties and discretionary fines. Further pressure can be exercised via control of printing houses and newsstands, which government-friendly parties have taken an interest in of late.
PiS has pioneered a form of media capture unique within the European Union.
– International Press Institute
One of the most alarming developments, however, happened in December, when state energy company PKN Orlen, headed by a PiS loyalist, acquired control of Polska Press from Germany’s Verlagsgruppe Passau, meaning PiS now controls 20 out of the 24 regional newspapers in the country.
According to the IPI report, PiS was unable to replicate the Hungarian model of relying on government-friendly oligarchs to purchase critical media, so it had to create its own. “PiS has pioneered a form of media capture unique within the European Union: the nationalisation of private media companies via state-owned and controlled companies,” the IPI report concludes.
And now the government has said it wants new taxes on advertising revenue – ranging from 2 to 10 per cent depending on type of advertising and media – that are likely to disproportionally hit the already battered independent press.
According to IPI, one effect of all these measures is that independent outlets and companies are weakened to a degree that owners end up unable to resist purchase offers by Polish state companies like Orlen. PiS already controls state channels and much of the local and regional media; national newspapers, magazines and even TV channels could be next.
The end game
“In Kaczynski’s ‘national democracy’ project, there is simply no place for independent media which does watchdogging,” argues Jakub Majmurek, a political commentator affiliated with Krytyka Polityczna. “For Kaczynski, the media always belongs to someone: it either carries his message or that of his opponent.”
“To maintain power, which is the ultimate goal of the PiS leader, it is therefore necessary to minimise the impact of those media channels which the power perceives as the enemy,” Majmurek explains.
“For Kaczynski, the ideal seems to be a model in which all the major media are under the control of state companies or, in the worst case, belong to oligarchs who are dependent on the government. Opinions critical of the government would only appear in activist-citizen media without real reach, which are constantly underfunded and lack real possibilities to expand,” he says.
IPI’s Jamie Wiseman warns that, “Developments in Poland over the last few months should be sounding major alarm bells in Brussels. Statements and Twitter posts from EU leaders will not suffice.”
“It is essential that the Commission recognises that the [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orban model for media capture is being exported to other states with devastating effects. These dual assaults on media freedom are not simply an issue for democracy in Poland or Hungary, but for the whole of the EU,” Wiseman concludes.
