On Sunday, Sept. 6, roughly 29,000 Poles paid a television station’s government bill.
The station is Telewizja Republika, for most of this year the most-watched news channel in the country and the largest conservative broadcaster in it. Since January 2024 it has been under an advertiser boycott it has never escaped. Viewer donations now rival the network’s entire commercial revenue. Last week those donations had to stretch to the annual installment on its state broadcast license — roughly $550,000 — which the station did not have. It said so on air, opened its studio doors to the public and put its hosts on in shifts. Donations came from Polish households and from Poles calling in from Chicago, New York, and Toronto. Within nine hours the appeal had raised the money. It was the second September in a row the station had come up short.
I should say where I stand. I appear on Republika several times a week, from afternoon commentary shows to the main evening newscast. Nobody reading an American newspaper should have to guess at my interests. What follows is not a plea on my own behalf; the money was raised without any help from Washington. It is an account of what a $4 million State Department initiative looks like from one of the countries it is meant to reach.
Why the viewers have to
A boycott is easy to declare and hard to measure, so here is the measurement.
In November of last year, with Republika at or near the top of the ratings, Nielsen counted 89 companies running advertisements on it. On wPolsce24 — a rival conservative channel with a fraction of the audience — it counted 139.
A station can live on a handful of advertisers if they are the right ones. What is harder to explain is a market-leading audience that attracts fewer advertisers than a much smaller rival. Reach is what television advertisers ordinarily buy, and Polish media buyers purchase it by the ratings point; before January 2024 they were not even checking which channels sat inside the packages they bought. Something other than audience size is shaping this market.
What happened in January 2024 was that two elderly guests — guests, not the station’s journalists — said things on air about migrants that were widely and rightly condemned. Another guest objected on the spot; management publicly disowned the remarks the same day. It made no difference. Within days at least 14 major brands had pulled their spots, IKEA, mBank and Carrefour among them, and many of the largest have never returned. A year later the head of Poland’s biggest charity telethon told companies that if they wanted to work with him, they could not buy new advertising on Republika. Lidl and the confectioner Wawel went within days.
Every one of those companies acted lawfully and had a defensible reason. Brand safety is a real commercial calculation, and no advertiser owes a broadcaster its money. Americans have watched enough of their own advertiser boycotts to recognize the shape of this. What is unusual is not the decision. It is the durability. More than two and a half years later, the remarks have long since been disowned, the audience is among the largest in its category, and the sponsor list still looks like that.
The pressure was not only commercial. Republika’s reporters were shut out of government press conferences until a Warsaw court ruled the exclusion unlawful. A separate case challenging the procedure by which its broadcast license was awarded is still pending before the courts.
Nobody has shut this station down. There is no decision to appeal against. It was billed, denied access, starved of advertising, and dragged through litigation — and then invited to explain what exactly it was complaining about.
Gratitude, not a claim
At the end of August, Reuters reported that the State Department had notified Congress of at least $25 million for conservative civil society in Europe, including $4 million for independent media. France’s foreign minister called it foreign interference. Recipients have not been named.
Let me be exact about the register, because Poles asking Americans for money is not what this is. The United States owes Poland’s conservative press nothing. American taxpayers are not obliged to underwrite a Warsaw newsroom, and I would not respect a Polish writer who told them otherwise. What I can report is how the decision was received here — as good news, and with gratitude — because for nearly three years the people it concerns have been told, in a hundred procedural ways, that their side of the argument is a nuisance to be managed rather than a constituency to be answered.
And money of this kind is never only money. At the Munich Security Conference last year, Vice President JD Vance told Europe that the threat he worried about most was not Russia or China but “the threat from within,” and that “in Britain and across Europe, free speech I fear is in retreat.” The room received it badly. A budget line is that same argument in a form no government can wave off as rhetoric. It says somebody outside the country is watching how this is being done and has taken the trouble to write it down — and it is addressed as much to the people doing it as to the people it helps. European governments mind being looked at by Washington a great deal more than they mind being shouted at by their own opposition.
A reader entitled to be skeptical will ask what independence means when the money comes from a government, and the question deserves an answer rather than a dodge. What costs a newsroom its independence is dependence on any one source large enough to matter — which is precisely the condition described above. Four million dollars spread across an entire continent will not transform the finances of a national television network. Nor should it. Republika has already shown it can raise its own money. What such funding can reach are the people with no telethon to run.
There is no blacklist. No ministry has published one and nobody has signed one. Conservative guests still appear on public television from time to time. But an occasional guest does not make a broadcaster pluralistic, and the newsrooms that actually carry conservative opinion in Poland — outlets with large, measurable audiences — have effectively disappeared from the regular political discussion on Poland’s public broadcasters, the ones that were supposed to be depoliticized after December 2023. Below them are the individuals: journalists dismissed in that purge who, three years on, have never worked in the profession again, and small specialist newsrooms covering geopolitics, economics, and religion that cannot stage a Sunday appeal because they have no mass audience to appeal to.
That is a market failure, not a martyrdom. It also happens to be the size of problem $4 million can address.
The cheapest allies in Europe
There is a plainly American argument here, and it does not depend on anyone’s sympathy.
Poland spends 4.68% of gross domestic product on defense this year — behind only the three Baltic states in the alliance, and ahead of every larger economy in it — and serves as the main logistics hub for NATO’s eastern flank. And the constituency that watches Republika and reads the conservative press is about as unambiguously Atlanticist as any you will find in Europe: no hedging about strategic autonomy, no quiet satisfaction when Washington stumbles. These are people who would have to be argued out of liking America, not into it.
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Friends are not obligations. But a government spending this kind of money in Europe might reasonably notice where its remaining friends actually are, and reflect that keeping them costs less than making new ones.
On Sunday, 29,000 Poles put up half a million dollars to pay their television station’s government license bill. They were not waiting for anyone’s help. That is exactly why they are worth helping.
Miłosz Manasterski is a Polish journalist and political commentator. His columns and weekly political review appear on Telewizja Republika’s news website, and he is a regular commentator on the network.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
