Introducing the Guest of his Evening show, host Wojciech Szelag told two activists, Bart Staszewski and Maja Heban: "LGBT+ people are not an ideology, but people: specific names, faces, loved ones and friends.
“All these people should hear the words, ‘I’m sorry,’ from this place today.”
Wojciech Szelag said that LGBT people had been targeted for “years” by “hateful words”.
The channel, TVP Info, was criticised as a mouthpiece of the previous governing Law and Justice (PiS) party.
But pro-EU Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who came to power in December, has overseen changes to the broadcaster.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A journalist for the Polish state broadcaster has apologised for his channel’s “shameful” role in spreading anti-LGBT sentiment.
The leader of PiS, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, regularly denounced the “madness” of people “declaring” themselves gay or changing gender and blamed Western Europe for exporting alien ideas to Catholic Poland.
While running for re-election in 2020, President Andrzej Duda, a PiS ally, told a rally that LGBT was an “ideology” rather than people.
On 20 December last year, TVP Info was taken off air after top officials were dismissed by Minister of Culture Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz.
The move was described by Mr Tusk’s government as intended to “depoliticise” state media, but many, including Polish liberals, had concerns about the way he went about recovering editorial control.
Polish LGBT activists say TVP Info was instrumental in spreading anti-LGBT hate under PiS rule.
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