Tarnished Media Bill Goes Down in Flames
 Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "New Warsaw Express" Prime Minister Leszek Miller on Monday officially killed Poland's controversial media bill after a parliamentary commission investigating the Rywingate corruption scandal charged that gross improprieties were committed during its preparation. Ever since its first draft, the bill has come under heavy fire for containing regulations that many commentators say were aimed against private media companies hostile to the government. "We cannot push the work on the bill any further," Miller told Polish Radio 1. "Even if it was passed, it wouldn't help the quality of the law, Polish media or parliament." The Rywingate scandal broke at the end of last year when the daily Gazeta Wyborcza accused film producer Lew Rywin of having asked media house Agora, the paper's publisher, for a $17.5m bribe on behalf of "ruling circles". In return, the paper said, Rywin offered to organise a change in the bill's capital concentration regulations to enable Agora to buy a stake in nationwide private broadcaster Polsat. The killer blow came over the weekend in testimony to the parliamentary commission on improprieties in the bill's drafting. The question marks relate to a passage in article 36, which stipulated that nationwide newspaper or magazine publishers would be banned from buying television stations with country-wide coverage. The government claimed this provision would protect the country's media market from foreign domination and the spectre of monopoly in general. However, some time in early 2002, the words "and magazines" were dropped in mysterious circumstances, leaving the impression that the entire article was tailormade to harass Agora, at that time the only nationwide newspaper publisher with ambitions of buying into a national broadcaster. After hearing testimony on the issue, the commission asked prosecutors to begin investigating what it saw as illegal changes to the bill, but stopped short of overtly pointing its finger at anyone. "It's apparent that one of the witnesses is not telling the truth," commission chairman Tomasz Nalecz said after Saturday's hearings. The main body of speculation fell on KRRiTV media watchdog lawyer Janina Sokolowska, who is closely connected to one of the SLD men at the centre of the affair – KRRiTV secretary Wlodzimierz Czarzasty. Later in the week the government signalled it will begin work on a new version of the bill immediately. SIMON CYGIELSKI TEST
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