When authoritarian-minded governments capture public media, can reforms rebuild public trust after they fall from power? In Poland, the Law and Justice party spent years turning public television into a partisan mouthpiece — a textbook case of democratic backsliding. A study of Polish viewers found that after the 2023 transition to a pro-democratic government, reforms narrowed the partisan divide in public media trust: while PiS supporters became somewhat less trusting and new government supporters somewhat more so, source cue effects were no longer significant — suggesting that the public television brand had become effectively neutral, rather than simply captured by a new political side.
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