Polskie Radio


The Polish Radio is a national public-service radio broadcasting organization of Poland, founded in 1925. It is owned by the State Treasury of Poland. On 27 December 2023, the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, due to the President's veto on the financing of the company, placed it in liquidation.

Chronology

Polskie Radio was founded on 18 August 1925 and began making regular broadcasts from Warsaw on 18 April 1926. Before the Second World War, Polish Radio operated one national channel – broadcast from 1931 from one of Europe's most powerful longwave transmitters situated at Raszyn and destroyed in 1939 due to invasion of German Army.
Polskie Radio was also broadcast on nine regional stations - Kraków from 15 February 1927, Poznań from 24 April 1927, and Katowice from 4 December 1927. Wilno joined the network from 15 January 1928. In 1930, regional stations broadcast from Lwów from 15 January 1930
and from Łódź from 2 February 1930. Toruń followed from 15 January 1935, with Warszawa broadcasting from 1 March 1937 – known as Warszawa II, the national channel becoming Warszawa I from this date. Baranowicze finally broadcast as the ninth regional station from 1 July 1938.
A tenth regional station was planned for Łuck, but the outbreak of war meant that it never opened. Out of notable people for the time, Czesław Miłosz, recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, worked as a literary programmer at Polish Radio Wilno in 1936.
The invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union led to the destruction of the network in September 1939, with its final broadcast being a performance of Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. posth. by Władysław Szpilman. Years later, Szpilman played the same piece for the reopening of the station.
Polskie Radio Trójka has been compiling Polish music charts since 1982 – in an era before there were any commercial sales or airplay rankings – making them a significant record of musical popularity in Poland. Chart archives dating from 1982 are available to the public via the station's website.
After the war, Polskie Radio was reconstructed with the assistance of the Soviet Red Army, which valued radio as a propaganda medium. It came under the tutelage of the state public broadcasting body Komitet do Spraw Radiofonii "Polskie Radio".
This body was dissolved in 1992, Polskie Radio S.A. and Telewizja Polska S.A. becoming politically dependent corporations, each of which was admitted to full active membership of the European Broadcasting Union on 1 January 1993 with the merger of EBU and OIRT.
Since 2001, Polskie Radio, jointly with Telewizja Polska, hold the "Dwa Teatry" Festival", an annual festival showcasing their television and radio plays. During the closing ceremony, awards are presented in several categories, recognizing the best productions and acting performances.

Channels

National

Polskie Radio also operates 17 regional radio stations, located in:
Polskie Radio offers city stations in:
  • Gorzów Wielkopolski – Radio Gorzów
  • Lublin – Radio Freee
  • Poznań – MC Radio
  • Słupsk – Radio Słupsk
  • Szczecin – Radio Szczecin Extra
  • Wrocław – Radio RAM
  • Zielona Góra – Radio Zielona Góra
  • Łódź – Radio Łódź Nad Wartą
All city stations but Radio Szczecin Extra are being broadcast on FM and in Internet, while Radio Szczecin Extra is available only in Internet and via DAB+.

Digital-only

Polskie Radio also offers regional digital-only stations in:

AI generated programming

On 29 October 2024, OFF Radio Krakow released a programme that presented itself as an interview with laureate Wisława Szymborska who had died in 2012 thus her voice being artificially generated; this was not long after its entire editorial team was dismissed. This was met with outrage with audiences voicing support for the dismissed crew as well as the signing of a petition against the move with more than 15,000 names in.