"Turning off the factory of hate' Polish TV tunes in to a new tolerance

On his first day as the new head of TVP, the sprawling Polish public television holding, Tomasz Sygut spent four hours locked in his office while a crowd outside banged on the door trying to gain access.

- Shaun Walker

Eventually, said Sygut, he had to call the police to help him escape.

The same day, two of the main TVP channels were abruptly taken off the air by the new managers, the feed replaced with holding music and the TVP logo. "The priority was to turn off the factory of hate," said Sygut at his 10th-floor office atop TVP headquarters, with a panoramic view over Warsaw.

Appointed in December, soon after a new Polish government led by Donald Tusk took office, the 45-year-old Sygut is at the centre of the first major battlefield in Tusk's attempts to create a new and more tolerant Poland after eight years of rule by the far-right populist Law and Justice (PiS) party.

Under the PiS, TVP's main news station actively campaigned for the party, portraying Tusk as a German agent bent on destroying Poland.

It frequently targeted migrants, LGBT+ people and other minorities.

"The people who worked here over the last eight years, they weren't journalists ... it was a ministry of propaganda," said Sygut.

Since taking over, he has brought in more than 200 new employees.

Many of them, like Sygut himself, had worked at TVP but left after the PiS took over in 2015.

At a planning meeting for the main evening news show this week, all 13 people at the table were new hires. "We have to re-establish credibility, but it's going to take time," said Anna Łubian-Halicka, a reporter and presenter who returned to TVP this month.

Tusk's coalition government, which yesterday marked 100 days in office, finds itself in a strange position, with a huge mandate for change after record turnout in October's election but its hands tied legislatively. The PiS-allied president, Andrzej Duda, wields veto power over any legislation, and during its years in office, the PiS packed ostensibly neutral bodies such as the media watchdog board with political appointees.