Media

Warsaw faces the music as Polish pop song ignites censorship row


The weekly chart show on Poland’s Radio Trojka rarely makes waves beyond the world of music. But in recent days, a scandal over the alleged censorship of a song critical of the ruling party’s leader has ignited a furious debate about media freedom in the EU’s fifth-biggest state.

The top spot on May 15 was taken by “Your pain is better than mine”, a song obliquely criticising Poland’s de facto leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski. The lyrics refer to a visit Mr Kaczynski made to a Warsaw cemetery last month on the anniversary of the Smolensk air crash in which his twin Lech died, even though cemeteries were closed to the public because of coronavirus.

Not long after the show finished, links to the chart were disabled and news about the recording, written and performed by veteran rock musician Kazik Staszewski, vanished from the state radio station’s website.

Amid uproar on social media, Radio Trojka’s director, Tomasz Kowalczewski, issued a statement saying there had been “manipulation” in the counting of listener votes and the chart had therefore been annulled.

However, two of Trojka’s journalists claimed that Mr Kowalczewski had pushed for Kazik’s song to be suppressed, and the episode has been seized on by critics of the ruling Law and Justice party as emblematic of how media freedoms have been eroded during its time in office.

Polish pop star Dawid Podsiadlo: ‘It's hard to look without emotion at this latest example of culture being demolished’
Polish pop star Dawid Podsiadlo: ‘It’s hard to look without emotion at this latest example of culture being demolished’ © Lukasz Zietek

Mr Kowalczewski has denied any censorship took place. But the affair has plunged Trojka, long regarded as a mainstay of the Polish cultural scene, into turmoil. Several high-profile journalists have quit, and this Friday’s chart show did not take place. However, the station published the results of the latest listener voting — which was topped by Kazik’s song.

Some musicians have now demanded their music is not played by the station. “It’s hard to look without emotion at this latest example of culture being demolished,” Dawid Podsiadlo, one of Poland’s most prominent pop stars, wrote on his Facebook page, comparing the episode with the pressures on artists in Poland before the collapse of communism in 1989.

“If on today’s [Radio Trojka] politics is more important than music, if a song causes the return of the worst communist practices, which I know only from books and stories, then I think that my songs should not be played on this station until creative freedom of speech returns.”

The affair has even drawn criticism from some members of Law and Justice. Joachim Brudzinski, an MEP and close ally of Mr Kaczynski — who holds no formal office but is widely seen as Poland’s most powerful politician — described the radio’s removal of references to Kazik’s chart topper as “either stupidity or someone’s ill will”.

“In a free country, artists have a right to their artistic (sometimes unwise) interpretation of events,” he wrote on Twitter.

However, critics claim Law and Justice has itself overseen a sustained decline of press freedoms. Since the party, founded by Mr Kaczynski, came to power in 2015, Poland has tumbled from 18th to 62nd place in the World Press Freedom Index, and now lies below Niger and Romania.

Although the country still has a host of private media groups which freely criticise the government on a daily basis, there have been cases of journalists coming under pressure. But the pressure is most evident in the state media, which even Poland’s culture minister, Piotr Glinski, admitted last week was “in some sense linked with the political authorities”.

Marek Tejchman, deputy editor of the centrist newspaper, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, said that the Kazik affair was indicative of a climate in which staff at state media were afraid of doing anything that would upset the upper echelons of Law and Justice.

“It tells you a lot about the public media . . . and the mechanisms of power in Poland right now, and they are all centred around Jaroslaw Kaczynski,” he said. “There is a mechanism of people twisting themselves into the paranoia of trying to guess what their supervisor thinks — and what the ultimate supervisor thinks.”

Mr Glinski said that the government’s influence on the state media was a necessary counterbalance to what he claimed was an unbalanced media market, and that Polish governments of all stripes had sought to exert similar influence.

But critics say that Law and Justice has gone further than its predecessors. “It is a Polish political custom that the public media is captured by the party that is in government,” said Dariusz Rosiak, who headed a current affairs programme on Radio Trojka until January.

“But the scale of this capture, the scale of the political intrusion, the scale of the widespread propaganda that has been going on over the past five years is not to be compared and not be confused with what happened before Law and Justice came to power,” he added.

The affair now looks set to become an issue in Poland’s postponed presidential election, which is expected to take place at the end of next month. Rafal Trzaskowski, who replaced Malgorzata Kidawa-Blonska last week as the candidate for Civic Platform, the main opposition party, called for a debate on the future of state media, and in particular state TV, which he said was so discredited that it needed a fundamental overhaul.

However, observers such as Mr Rosiak are sceptical about the chances of reversing the politicisation. “I think it’s impossible to undo it. The scale of demoralisation of journalists, of broadcasters, of people who work there, is enormous,” he said.

“This is an example of the complete mess that has been created over the last three decades within this system of the public media in Poland.”



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