The Polish centre-left Government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has announced a probe into the takeover of Polish commercial broadcaster TVN by Paramount Skydance, in a statement issued on October 6.
The TVN takeover is taking place as a result of Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion (€95 billion) acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, completed on October 6 in the US. The merged group has been renamed Skydance and is run by co-chief executives David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz.
TVN is a commercial operation that for over 20 years has been supportive of Tusk and his Civic Coalition (KO) and was hostile to the last conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government that ruled Poland between 2015 and 2023.
US media group Scripps Networks Interactive acquired TVN in 2015 from its original Polish owners. Discovery acquired Scripps three years later, bringing TVN under its ownership before it became part of Warner Bros. Discovery following a 2022 merger with WarnerMedia.
Poland’s Ministry of State Assets, which is responsible for the probe into the purchase of the Polish entity, has said it will assess whether the takeover threatens national security or public order. It has 90 days from receiving notification of the transaction in which to decide.
The ministry’s communications director Przemysław Kuk said TVN is on a list of companies under state protection, set out in a December 2024 government regulation in which state television TVP, Polish-owned commercial network Polsat and the foreign-owned TVN were included. That regulation took effect on January 1, 2025 and raised the number of protected entities from 17 to 23.
“The takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance will also mean acquiring control over TVN” under Poland’s 2015 law on screening strategic investments, said Kuk.
“The Minister of State Assets, acting as the supervisory authority, will be obliged to conduct administrative proceedings in this case in order to verify the impact of the completed transaction on security or public order in Poland,” Kuk added.
“I assure you that it will be an entirely substantive and objective administrative procedure, carried out in fulfilment of a statutory obligation, and nothing more,” state assets minister Wojciech Bałczun told YouTube broadcaster Kanał Zero on October 7.
The government’s proceedings can end in one of two ways. The ministry can find no obstacle to the current shareholder exercising its rights in TVN, or it can rule that doing so is inadmissible, in which case, Kuk said, “the Minister of State Assets may order the sale of TVN shares by a set deadline.”
The Polish government added TVN and Polsat to its list of strategic companies on December 18, 2024, with Tusk stating at the time that the decision meant that “without the consent of the Polish government it will not be possible to take over or buy companies that are on this strategic list, companies that are under protection.”
That move came amid reports that Warner Bros. Discovery was considering selling TVN and that a businessman linked to Hungary’s then-Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was an ally of the Polish Conservatives, was seeking to buy it.
The list has since grown to 25 entities, among them Grupa Azoty, KGHM, Orlen and Tauron. Supervisory authorities can block transactions via objections citing grounds such as Poland’s independence and security or its NATO obligations. For TVN, that authority is the Ministry of State Assets.
The government’s move came amid concern in Warsaw over Russian interference and disinformation campaigns targeting European democracies.
Critics of the move argue that media companies have been placed on the list to protect the political interests of Tusk’s ruling Civic Coalition in the case of TVN and to exercise a degree of leverage over the other commercial network Polsat which offers more politically balanced coverage and any potential sale of that company to owners who might be hostile to the Tusk administration.
The European Commission has not seen fit to block the Paramount Skydance deal. It conditionally approved the merger with Warner Bros. Discovery on July 22, with its antitrust review examining competition on the EU market rather than on the domestic market.
The approval of the acquisition was dependent on Paramount’s commitments on film distribution, including the sale of its stake in United International Pictures, a cinema distribution venture with Universal, within 13 months of the deal closing, and not cooperating with Universal on distribution in Europe for 10 years. The remedies cover the 19 European Economic Area countries in which United International Pictures operates, Poland among them.
Tomasz Chróstny, head of Poland’s competition state watchdog UOKiK, has informed that his agency would not challenge the Commission’s decision.
He said it applies across the EU, so no national antitrust authority has grounds to contest it.
“I think all the regulatory elements and approvals required by law have now been obtained on the part of the company, and the takeover of control, or the merger of these two entities, which will have consequences in the case of TVN, can take place,” Chróstny explained, citing the Commission’s approval and a settlement reached in the United States days earlier.
That settlement, agreed on September 21 with 12 US states led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and approved by a federal judge on September 30, commits Paramount to increased US film production, a fund for workers displaced by the merger and new editorial monitoring of CNN and CBS.
The press freedom NGO Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has warned, though, that the takeover could directly threaten the independence of TVN24 and urged the Commission to demand guarantees for the news channel. In a statement on July 20 it asked the Commission and the European Board for Media Services to examine the merger under Article 23 of the European Media Freedom Act and to make binding guarantees of editorial independence a condition of approval.
RSF rested its warning on the record of Paramount owner David Ellison at CBS News and on the presence of sovereign wealth funds from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia among the group’s shareholders. It did not set out why the independence of TVN was not under threat under the previous liberal owners.
It would be hard for RSF to claim that pluralism of views was under threat in TVN or the Polish media as a whole. Poland ranks 27th of 180 countries and territories in the organisation’s own 2026 World Press Freedom Index.
TVN does not have journalists who are sympathetic towards conservative viewpoints working for it but Polish media as a whole has a range of broadcasters who are liberal, conservative or offer balanced coverage.
US President Donald Trump welcomed the merger after it was confirmed on October 6. Told by a reporter that the deal had closed, he said: “It’s gonna be a great company” and “I’m glad they let it go.”
Paramount co-chief executive David Ellison is the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder, who has long supported Trump.
Polish PM Tusk in the past has called Trump a “Russian asset” but the opposition Conservatives (PiS) allied Polish President Karol Nawrocki is a close ally of President Trump.
Paramount Skydance’s holdings included Paramount Pictures, CBS, Nickelodeon, MTV and Paramount+. Warner Bros. Discovery controlled HBO, Max, CNN, Warner Bros. Studios, Discovery Channel and Cartoon Network, as well as Poland’s TVN network.
There is little doubt that should the Polish government decide to attempt to force Paramount Skydance to sell its shares in TVN it would lead to a row between the Polish government and the Trump administration, which is sympathetic towards David Ellison’s company.
Poland’s opposition PiS has been lobbying their allies in the US Republican Party and the Trump administration to persuade Paramount Skydance not to sell its share in TVN and to make that network’s coverage of Polish and international affairs more balanced.
Successive US administrations have defended the interests of American investors. This was the case when, in the time of Trump’s first term, the then PiS administration attempted to introduce a media law, known as lex TVN, that would have prevented foreign investors from being majority shareholders in Polish media.
The US administration opposed that legislation and persuaded Trump’s ally President Andrzej Duda to veto the bill in December 2021, which PiS wanted approving in order for a Polish consortium to acquire a majority stake in TVN.
Any forced divestment usually lowers the price of the shares, meaning Paramount Skydance would almost certainly seek redress for losses suffered in an action against the Polish government.
Poland is currently engaged in negotiations with the US over the setting up of a permanent US military base in the country, a measure favoured by Trump but not necessarily the Pentagon.
Any potential conflicts with the US at a time of sensitive negotiations taking place against the backdrop of the US reducing their overall military commitments in Europe could complicate proceedings.
Polish opposition PiS politicians have alleged that Tusk is not in favour of a permanent US base on the grounds that it may complicate Poland’s relations with Germany and France which he thinks are a priority for Poland and that the government has been dragging its feet in the negotiations over the creation of the base and its exact location.
PiS fears that if the government declares that an American owner of a Polish media outlet is a threat to national security and public order the US administration may believe that the Polish authorities feel something similar about US troops on Polish soil.
Any row over TVN may also coincide with the threatened forceful takeover of the Constitutional Tribunal (TK) which the Tusk government has threatened in its dispute with President Nawrocki over the membership of that tribunal.
PiS MEP Adam Bielan, who has close links to the US Republicans and the Trump administration, has gone on the record saying that “the Americans could not get their heads around the sight of a government ordering police to take over a court to secure places for Tusk’s nominees”.
He was referring to the fact that the latest judge elected by the Tusk majority in the Sejm on September 4, Maciej Berek, who has not been accepted by President Nawrocki, was until recently a minister in the Tusk government whom the PM himself called his “right-hand man”.
Bielan is convinced that the US administration would not accept any forceful takeover of the constitutional court and that the consequences could be disastrous for Polish-American relations, including the possible freezing of any decision on a permanent US military base in Poland.
