National Broadcasting Council

KRRiT is an independent agency, with powers specified directly in the Polish Constitution, and members elected by the President and each of the chambers of the Parliament for 6-year terms.

While theoretically apolitical, members of the council were de facto appointed by the political parties, in rough proportion to their power.

The post-communist head of the public Polish Television, Robert Kwiatkowski [pl], was widely accused of using it as a propaganda machine for the Democratic Left Alliance.

Some of the early accusations include highly disproportional coverage of SLD in 1997-2001, when SLD leader Leszek Miller was given more airtime than all members of the government combined (according to some calculations), airing a documentary claiming Lech Kaczyński's involvement in the FOZZ scandal just before the elections (later found to be baseless), and a general bias in coverage of political news.

The big problems however started only after the 2001 elections, when some members of the KRRiT were named in a conspiracy to gain control over the private media (the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and the TV station Polsat) by falsifying the laws (in the strand of the Lew Rywin scandal referred to as "or newspapers" (lub czasopisma, in honor of wording of the media law that was illegally switched after approval by the government), and using their broadcast licensing power to exert political and economical pressure over local private broadcasters.