Former television agency head ends protest after three weeks
The former head of the Television Information Agency (TAI) Michal Adamczyk on Saturday ended his three week sit-in at TAI headquarters but vowed the fight against the government's restructuring of the media will continue until victory.
Adamczyk, who held a press conference outside the TAI building on Saturday, thanked viewers of the "legal, true and free Polish Television" for "the words of support that have been coming to them for three weeks and are still coming."
"On December 20 last year, by force and violence, lawlessness and deception, the legal authorities of TVP were expelled, many journalists, many employees and collaborators were expelled. The legal signal of Telewizja Polska was turned off, the authoritarians' signal was connected. These methods and actions are similar to those used in Belarus," Adamczyk said.
Last month, Poland's new government took over public media outlets. The culture minister, Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz, dismissed the boards of all public media, took the state 24-hour news channel, TVP Info, off the air and put the country's public television (Telewizja Polska or TVP), radio and news agency into liquidation in a bid, as the government said, to restore impartiality to state media.
This decision has been widely criticised by politicians of the former ruling party Law and Justice (PiS) who, since the appointment of new public media management boards, have been staging protests at a number of media institutions, including TAI headquarters, in a show of protest against what they believe to be the "illegal takeover" of the state media.
The new coalition government under the leadership of Donald Tusk, says that PiS had turned Poland's main media services into politically motivated propaganda outlets and Adamczyk was one of the main TVP news anchors under the previous government. (PAP)
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