TVN24, Poland's leading news channel, threatened with closure

“I would never have imagined experiencing this in Parliament,” says Agata Adamek, an emblematic figure in the political service of TVN24, the continuous news channel of the TVN network, in the crosshairs of the national-conservative government in power in Poland. Seated on the terrace of a café close to the Diet, where the Law and Justice party (PiS) had a controversial audiovisual law adopted on August 11, the journalist does not hide her emotion.

By prohibiting the allocation of broadcasting authorizations to media controlled "directly or indirectly" by entities outside the European Economic Area, the text voted by the Lower House of Parliament - and now in the hands of the Senate - could compromise the future of the channel, owned by the American giant Discovery.

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"What shocked me was not so much that the debates were about the future of a channel for which I have worked for so long, but, even more, to see how beliefs can change", says the journalist. In almost twenty years of existence on Polish territory, TVN24 has caused several scandals, with its revelations affecting successive governments, regardless of their political color. “But there was never any question of closing the channel, even under the first PiS government [2005-2007]. »

Information Access Restrictions

As soon as the PiS returned to power in 2015, relations between the channel and the government deteriorated sharply. The country's leading news channel and direct competitor of public television TVP, transformed by the PiS government into a veritable propaganda organ, TVN24 has experienced several attempts at intimidation.

In addition to defamatory statements by members of the government and reductions in the purchase of advertising space by public companies aimed directly at the media outlet, its journalists have sometimes suffered restrictions on access to information, confides Dominika Stepinska- Duch, member of the board of directors of TVN, met in this particularly tense context.

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For more than a year and a half, the channel has been waiting for the renewal of its broadcasting authorization by the National Radio and Television Council (Krrit). An abnormally long delay for a routine procedure, which could only have aroused concern within the management, which felt that the means of pressure were going to change in nature. “Nothing in the law allowing [the Krrit] to refuse us this renewal, it only remained for the government to change the law”, analyzes ^Ms. Stepinska-Duch.

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