This article was originally published by Myśl Polska.

State television holds the people for a bunch of thoughtless idiots, and this is undisputed. It serves them coarse propaganda on TVP1, TVP2 or TVP Info, which doesn’t make rational people even angry, but rather laugh. Watching the next news sites we see in front of our eyes the trainer Jarząbek from “Misia” singing “Dub dub, dub dub, long live the president of our club. Long live us! I sang that” and I thought that nothing could beat this – yet the meanders of mind are unexplored.

Yesterday I heard a message on TVN: “Unlike state television, we are INDEPENDENT, including financially – our owner is the Discovery company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, which protects freedom of speech as a fundamental value.”

And this shows how these polystyrene figures understand freedom and independence. For them, Radio Free Europe (RWE) is still a symbol of freedom and independence, because dollars, unlike rubles, do not stink.

Why could TVN calmly make such a bizarre statement? Because they knew that PiS would not say: “You are an American agent of influence”. Because the owners of TVN perfectly saw that the only thing PiS could reply would be: “No, we are more American. We are more honest and more ideological.”

Unfortunately, not many people in Poland will notice this paradox, because few think on their own. The spaces of freedom are shrinking a lot. One of the arguments against the Polish People’s Republic was that it did not allow freedom of speech and restrained independent thought. In this respect today is much worse because people do not notice that we only have left scraps of independent thought. State censorship was replaced by financial censorship. Today in the public space there are media dependent on large corporations or financed from the government budget.

We need information, not propaganda. That is why you have to stand on the side of all independent media, such as “Myśl Polska“, “Green standard” or the weekly “Panorama”. The orientation of these media is secondary. Support them and look for information in them.

Łukasz Marcin Jastrzębski