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What does this mean? PIS nationalized nominally-Polish companies owned by Germans? Or is it related to the media sales mentioned later?
I appreciate the writeup.
'Nationalized' isn't technically correct, in that the companies were sold rather than seized, but polandization of media was an established PIS goal partly accomplished in part by using control of the government to ban government entities from buying subscriptions, which undercut the financial viability of a significant number of media outlet. In short- financial viability depended on public purse strings, and so the party in power has power of the purse. (Which is one reason why it's unnecessarily likely to revert to foreign ownership- the same tactic could occur again, and media is even more dependent on state-support than before.)
The media sale was part of the PIS goal of re-polandizing the media, which was a multifaceted fight with both local and foreign interest groups that were actively arranged against the PIS. The role of foreign-owned media in the anti-PIS media sphere was openly acknowledged early on, and often mutually antagonistic. Here is an early 2019 article from DW (a German media company) that's rather frank about the nature of a significant parts of the majority-foreign-owned media sphere being part of the anti-PIS coalition. This is characteristic of the Polish media struggle after PIS came to power in 2016, where the sort of passive 'soft power' German-owned media influence in the earlier 2000s was giving way to more and more overt political influence attempts as part of anti-PIS polish politics.
The breaking point came in late 2020, with the purchase of Polska Press by a Polish state-owned refining company from Verlagsgruppe Passau, the German media company that had been running it since before PIS came in power. Polska Press was a media firm that owned hundreds of local newspapers and websites, including 20 out of Poland’s 24 regional daily newspapers as well as a further 120 regional weeklies. The portfolio of websites were reported to have over 10 million users, and the entire deal enabled access to an estimated 17 million media consumers, when Poland is a country of less than 40 million. Link
If that seems to be a lot, it is. Poland is a country of less than 40 million. But from a media-analysis, and PIS-perspective, the bigger point is that the concentration of ownership already existed.
For all the objections of PIS taking control of the papers, PIS couldn't have taken 20 of 24 regional daily newspapers in a single sale if someone else hadn't exercised collective ownership first, that party had been corporate German since before PIS came to power. While there's always an argument that German media was more neutral and objective and free from government influence, it's not exactly hard to find links between the 2010s German government and German media that enabled the German government to shape corporate media coverage.
It also probably didn't help that anther German media CEO wrote a letter to his Polish media workers calling a PIS politician a loser for opposing Donald Tusk and indicating his intent to apply editorial pressure in his preferred direction. That's the same Axel Springer media group co-owned (and now directly owns) PoliticoEU, one of the primary English-language media groups covering European politics as a direct feeder to the American political-media sphere via it's American cousin, Politico. If you read a media article on how Polish media freedoms were at threat in the later 2010s, there was a non-trivial chance it was either dervied from, or directly from, an Axel Springer outlet.
Axel Springer, completely unrelated, owned a number of Polish media interests in the 2010s that may or may not have been subject to polish-ownership risk.
Put it all together: in the mid-2010s as PIS campaigned to power, the media environment was a majority foreign-owned, especially German owned, with prominent German media actors already indicating a not-so-secret hostility to the incoming party. PIS declared it's intent to re-Polandize Polish media, the German-owned media fought back to preserve their ownership. Arguably, they lost. PIS may have lost this election, but only after a political generation and a general dismantling of the German media empire in Poland.
You're welcome.
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