Polish state TV deletes article fact-checking “misleading” claims by PM
Poland’s state broadcaster, TVP, has deleted an article from its website that found Prime Minister Donald Tusk to have made “misleading” accusations against the opposition.
On Thursday, news channel TVP Info published an article fact-checking a claim made by Tusk on Wednesday that in 2006 Anna Fotyka, the foreign minister in a Polish government led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, had “signed a document on Poland’s waiver of [war] reparations [from Germany]”.
The prime minister made that claim in response to criticism from PiS – which is now Poland’s main opposition party – that during a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday Tusk had failed to push for war reparations from Germany.
TVP Info’s article – titled “Fotyga ‘signed a document on Poland’s waiver of reparations’? No, we explain” – branded Tusk’s claim as “misleading” and a “manipulation”.
A screenshot of TVP Info’s now-deleted tweet linking to the now-deleted article on Tusk’s “misleading” claims.
“The foreign minister in [PiS Prime Minister] Jarosław Kaczyński’s [2006] government did not sign any document ‘on Poland’s waiver of reparations’,” wrote TVP Info. “The authorities at the time did not make any binding decisions in this matter.”
However, soon after being published, the post on TVP Info’s X account linking to the article was deleted. Then the article itself disappeared before reappearing in “much softer” form, observed Patryk Słowik, a journalist from news website Wirtualna Polska.
Finally, the article was deleted again and remains offline. Google searches and the Wayback Machine, an internet archive, still show the historical existence of the article but the link is now dead and redirects users to TVP Info’s homepage.
TVP Info has neither acknowledged the fact that the article was deleted nor explained why it happened.
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When Tusk’s government came to power in December, it immediately launched a controversial – and legally questionable – move to take control of state-owned media outlets, including TVP, from the previous PiS-appointed leaders.
The new ruling camp said that this was a necessary measure to “depoliticise” those outlets, which had been used by PiS as a propaganda mouthpiece during its eight years in power.
However, many observers note that, rather than removing political influence, the changes have simply resulted in a new bias in favour of the current government.
A number of PiS politicians today highlighted the deletion of TVP’s fact-checking article. “TVP Info’s journalists naively believed that they could write the truth about Tusk,” tweeted former PiS government spokesman Piotr Müller.
State TV is seen as the least objective news source among Poland’s main stations, according to a new poll.
Amid campaigning for the European elections, 90% of politicians appearing on TVP’s main evening news discussion show were from the ruling coalition https://t.co/LrYgDqvATQ
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) June 10, 2024
Main image credit: Slawomir Kaminski / Agencja Wyborcza.pl
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
