"I would like public media to support the government. Public TV is there not just to hound the government but to show its good side." PiS MP Ryszard Terlecki.

The context here was another tirade about how it's fine for PiS to turn public media, which has a statutory obligation to be politically neutral, into a conduit for the most grotesque forms of propaganda, because private media support the opposition. It's an argument I've heard

countless times since PiS began colonising public media in 2015, and it never gets any more convincing. To listen to these people, you'd never know that PiS was (and remains) staunchly supported by a range of media outlets with significant national reach.

And that aside, the question I always have for people who push this line is: if Poland’s media landscape really was so slanted away from PiS in 2015, and if that really is so consequential for political outcomes, how the hell did they get elected in the first place?

It's also a concept of media pluralism that betrays PiS's obsessively binary approach to, well, everything. If you go back to before 2015 and take an objective look at the output of liberal and moderate conservative media outlets, you will see plenty of criticism of what the

government was doing, mixed in with more positive coverage and some coverage that clearly evinces pro-government political bias. For PiS, the idea that you can be broadly pro a particular political option but also critical at times is an anathema. They see no middle ground

between the blanket negative coverage they see themselves receiving from those media outlets that aren't "ours" and the uncritical fawning they receive from those media outlets that *are "ours". And they then assume this is how the media operates more generally.