Law and Justice want TVP to be Compulsory, and Polsat and TVN Drop Out. “A Desperate Attempt to Sneak in Elections.”
Virtualmedia.pl was the first to write about the adopted amendment to the Broadcasting Act. The changes mainly concern the “must carry, must offer” principle, which determines which channels must be offered by pay TV operators. Until recently, the act indicated the following channels: TVP1, TVP2, TVP 3, Polsat, TVN, TV4, and TV Puls.
The amendment to the act assumes a reduction in these channels. The following are dropped from the list: TVN, Polsat, TV4, and TV Puls. So only public television channels remain – apart from TVP1, TVP2, and TVP3, TVP Info and TVP Kultura.
By means of a regulation, the National Broadcasting Council could extend the list of “must carry, must offer” channels.
According to the virtual media portal, according to the amendment, TVP channels covered by the “must carry, must offer” principle will have to find operators in the first five positions of the EPG in the following order: TVP1. TVP2, TVP3, TVP Info and TVP Kultura. The portal reminds us that the former president of TVP, Jacek Kurski, wanted TVP3 to be in third place in the operators’ set-top boxes.
The changes will increase the influence of government television
– If we had serious and good public media, I would not be so indignant about this project. It happens in the world that if the “must carry” rule applies, it applies primarily to public broadcasters. However, the bizarre idea is to dictate where in the remote control these channels should be. This is a typical PiS operation of centralizing everything on the principle that “we” as a state must be the most important – Krzysztof Luft, a former member of the National Broadcasting Council, comments for Onet.
— As a rule, “must carry, must offer.” I cannot imagine a situation where any operator would not distribute these TVP channels in a basic package, even if there were no regulations on this subject. After all, even today, when such a rule does not cover TVP Info, operators still distribute this channel in basic packages. So why plan any changes here at all? Onet’s interlocutor wonders.
A former member of the National Broadcasting Council has a specific theory here. — I see this project as part of a certain “technological sequence,” which is a desperate search for solutions before the elections to increase the influence of the propaganda tube, which is the party and government television, known as public television for disguise.
“Desperate attempts to cunning at the elections”
Luft recalls, among other things, as he calls it, the “war punch” of the Minister of the Interior and Administration, who applied to the Office of Electronic Communications to delay the change of the broadcasting standard for TVP programs until the end of 2023.
It was about switching to the DVB-T2 standard, which by June 30, 2022, was to replace the DVB-T technology present on the market since 2013. Owners of older TV sets that did not support such a standard had a problem.
The aforementioned amendment of the Ministry of the Interior and Administration for TVP stations was crucial. — This actually promotes these stations in low-urbanized areas and among recipients who do not have receivers and decoders prepared to switch to the new broadcasting system. Thanks to the ministry’s initiative, many of these TV viewers will remain with the current broadcasting system until the end of 2023 and will only receive public television programs,” comments Luft.
“The delay in the process of changing the TVP broadcasting standard until the end of 2023 is due to public security reasons and providing citizens with access to Regional Warning Systems,” the representatives of the Ministry of the Interior explained the reasons for their request, citing, among others, to the war in Ukraine and the aggressor’s disinformation activities.
The former member of the National Broadcasting Council has no doubt that the whole case was about something completely different. “These are such desperate attempts to cun the election. PiS sees that the elections promise a loss of power, which would be a disaster for this camp because they have too much behind their ears. So he grabs everything that could increase the influence of TVP propaganda.
Onet’s interlocutor also draws attention to the recent decision of the ruling party to add an additional PLN 700 million from the state budget to public television. — This is another shameless attempt to strengthen TVP’s propaganda power before the elections.
Billions of zlotys on TVP and without any mode. “Mr. Czabański, where is this law?”
— Tomorrow marks the seventh anniversary when the then deputy minister of culture and the current chairman of the National Media Council, Krzysztof Czabański, published the first page of the draft law on national media. He announced then that the entire draft would be submitted to the Sejm within a week. This project was to introduce a new system of public media, new rules, and a new system of financing these media. Seven years have passed. I would like to ask Mr. Czabański, where is this law?
Because so far, we’ve only got shameful shrewdness on the budget, where they decide how much money to put on public television without any procedure. Two billion zlotys, and now they discovered they could add another 700 million zlotys. And this is in a situation where hospital wards are closing down in the country when lighting is turned off in some cities, where savings are sought everywhere. However, this power does not save on party-government television. Arrogance and insolence without limits.