| A letter by Federation of Polish Associations in NSW to Mr Paul Cutler, Director News & Current Affairs, Special Broadcasting Service Corporation. I write to you on behalf of the Federation of Polish Associations in New South Wales with a request that SBS change the current provider of the Polish News program on SBS television. As you would know, Polish News is emitted daily at 7:30am on SBS 2 and has a wide following among our community members. For many years, the provider of this service has been Telewizja Polsat, with the name of the bulletin being ‘Wydarzenia’. We kindly request that the provider of the Polish News program be changed to the Polish public broadcaster, Telewizja Polska SA, and its equivalent evening bulletin called ‘Wiadomosci’, with the timing and length of the program to remain the same.
Telewizja Polska is a public corporation and Poland’s only public television broadcaster. It is a mass media organization with the legislated mission of furthering broad public education through its programs; and one not driven primarily by the profit motive. Its news and current affairs programs focus on the most important issues in the political, economic and social life of the nation and the world, largely excluding ‘tabloid’, trivial, sensationalist and celebrity news. This last point is especially important when considering the very limited time allocated to the program – the only Polish-language television program watched by some members of our community.
On the other hand, Telewizja Polsat is a commercial station which by its nature produces news services that devote much attention to relatively trivial ‘human interest’ stories (much like the difference between, for example, the news bulletins of SBS and Channel 10). More importantly, as a private company its primary aim is to turn a profit, thus exposing it to the risk of undue influence from business interests. One of the chief complaints we hear leveled against Polsat by its Polish Australian audience is that of political bias.
Finally, we would like to point out that, much like SBS, the most respected providers of foreign language television news to SBS, and internationally, are public broadcasters like Deutche Welle, the BBC and France Television. For all these reasons, on behalf of our members we strongly urge that you implement what we hope is a relatively straightforward programming change.
We thank you for your consideration of this request and look forward to your reply in due course.
Yours sincerely
Dr Richard Adams Dzierzba
President of Federation
Executive Committee
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