TVN disseminated false information about conversations in the cockpit of the Tupolev, about an alleged quarrel between Gen. Błasik and Capt. Protasiuk manipulated the issue of an explosion and relied on experts from an institution linked to Russia. Yet it was the journalists of the Niezalezna.pl portal who were sued by TVN for telling the truth about the false information spread by the broadcaster.
The hearing in the case brought by TVN will take place on Wednesday (17 December) at 10:00 a.m. at the Regional Court in Warsaw. The management of the station from Wiertnicza Street did not appreciate reminders of its manipulations regarding Smolensk.
Words that never existed
Let us recall that the propaganda campaign involved, among others, Joanna Komolka, who at TVN dealt with the Smolensk disaster. In 2010, she “revealed” an unofficial transcript of a conversation from the Tupolev cockpit.
“If I don’t land / if we don’t land, he will kill me/they will kill me.” Strong words on board the presidential Tupolev several dozen seconds before the crash – according to a deciphered fragment of a transcript obtained by TVN24. They were allegedly spoken by the Tupolev’s captain, Arkadiusz Protasiuk,”
it was later said on Fakty TVN.
It ultimately turned out that no such words appeared in the transcripts. Neither such a statement by Protasiuk nor any similar sentences were found on the recording of conversations in the Tu-154 pilots’ cockpit.
As Grzegorz Wierzchołowski later recalled in his articles, an expert was quickly found to comment appropriately on the statements, later shown to be invented.
“If this is confirmed, it shows how determined the pilot was. The fact that he did not decide to go around again means he feared the consequences of not landing,”
said Capt. Robert Zawada, a parliamentary aviation expert, with evident emotion on TVN24.
Lying about Błasik
Gen. Błasik was also targeted. TVN24 reported that on 10 April, before the flight from Warsaw to Smolensk at the military Okęcie airport, there had been a quarrel between Capt. Arkadiusz Protasiuk and Gen. Błasik.
“As established by a reporter of TVN24’s ‘Polska i Świat’ program, industrial cameras were said to have recorded on the morning of 10 April a conversation between two military officers – clearly agitated, arguing: Gen. Andrzej Błasik and Capt. Arkadiusz Protasiuk. The officers were allegedly arguing about the flight to Smolensk. […] Gen. Andrzej Błasik was said to have reprimanded his subordinate and allegedly used vulgar language. It was supposedly because of this quarrel, which carried all the way to the aircraft stairs, that Gen. Błasik, rather than Capt. Protasiuk greeted the President,”
reported the tvn24.pl portal.
Later (in a scenario almost identical to the “if I don’t land, he’ll kill me” case), Gazeta Wyborcza supplemented these revelations. The topic of the alleged quarrel between Protasiuk and Błasik completely dominated television news, the press, and online media for several days.
On 15 March, after three weeks of a hatred campaign against Gen. Błasik, military prosecutors conducting the investigation into the disaster ultimately admitted that no quarrel had occurred. Col. Zbigniew Rzepa, then spokesperson for the Military Prosecutor’s Office, stated:
“Prosecutors have completed their review of video recordings from Okęcie airport from 10 April 2010. They found no frames indicating that any quarrel took place between the Air Force Commander, Gen. Andrzej Błasik, and the aircraft commander, Capt. Arkadiusz Protasiuk.”
Moreover, none of the industrial cameras installed at the military Okęcie airport (including those in the VIP lounge, where the alleged altercation was to have occurred) even recorded a situation in which the two officers were standing next to each other.
Experts from Hungary and Rosatom
On the 14th anniversary of the Smolensk attack, TVN aired the report “Siła śledztwa” (“The Power of the Investigation”) by Piotr Świerczek. In it, the author and prosecutor Krzysztof Schwartz attacked MP Antoni Macierewicz and the Smolensk subcommittee, while at the same time invoking the authority of “independent” experts from Hungary, acting as prosecution experts. They neglected to add that the University of Debrecen, under which the center from which these specialists originate operates, awarded Vladimir Putin an honorary doctorate in 2017. The university itself closely cooperates with Russian institutions as well as with the powerful Kremlin nuclear conglomerate Rosatom.
It was Piotr Świerczek, the author of “Siła kłamstwa” (“The Power of the Lie”), who in 2011 prepared material claiming that before the flight from Warsaw to Smolensk at the military Okęcie airport, there had been a quarrel between the Tupolev crew commander, Capt. Arkadiusz Protasiuk and the Air Force Commander Gen. Andrzej Błasik.
Manipulations about an explosion
In 2022, the TVN24.pl portal claimed to have obtained information about the alleged conclusions of an international team of experts examining the causes of the Smolensk disaster, appointed by the National Prosecutor’s Office. The article’s headline on TVN24.pl read: “International experts: no injuries in the bodies of Smolensk crash victims indicating an explosion.”
This information was said to appear in a decision by prosecutor Michał Przybyłowski dated 24 November, concerning the admission of “evidence from a supplementary opinion by experts in forensic medicine.”
In one of the questions, prosecutor Przybyłowski asked for clarification as to whether the experts’ position – that “in no case did the opinions indicate the presence of any injuries or other medical features whose nature in itself would constitute grounds for substantiating the hypothesis of a violent release of energy in the form of an explosion of explosive or flammable materials” – applied to all preliminary and supplementary opinions issued and analyzed by the international team of experts.
“From the cited fragment, it therefore follows that the final conclusion of the expert team indicated that no explosion occurred on board the Tu-154 in Smolensk,”
summarized tvn24.pl.
This is the first manipulation: the experts’ conclusion – which in any case is not “final” – does not prove “that no explosion occurred on board the Tu-154,” as TVN24 put it. Forensic medicine experts are not specialists in explosions, aviation disasters, or aircraft damage analysis, and they did not adjudicate on that matter. They merely indicated that in the body fragments they examined, they found no injuries whose nature “in itself” would directly indicate an explosion. This is akin to turning information about the absence of a suspect’s fingerprints on a murder weapon into the statement: no murder occurred.
Manipulation No. 2: the experts examined only a limited number of body parts, and at that time had not yet commented at all on documentation concerning others, contrary to what TVN suggests already in the headline. This is evidenced by a fragment of the cited document omitted by tvn24.pl. Prosecutor Przybyłowski also asked the experts to “answer the question of whether the data contained in the documentation made available to the experts concerning the bodies and human remains of the victims of the Tu-154 No. 101 disaster, NOT SUBJECTED to post-exhumation examinations carried out by the International Team of Experts,” indicate an explosion.
Manipulation No. 3: the same experts cited by TVN and Piotr Świerczek state elsewhere: “Referring directly to the questions contained in the decision of the National Prosecutor’s Office, it should nevertheless be stated that the degree of dismemberment of the body, as well as the presence of foreign bodies within the exhumed remains described in a separate protocol, makes it impossible, based solely on an assessment of the injuries sustained, to unequivocally exclude the hypothesis of a violent release of energy in the form of an explosion” (excerpt from Volume VI of the National Prosecutor’s Office files, cited in Appendix No. 5 to the final Smolensk report). This is a glaring contradiction of the thesis advanced in the tvn24.pl article.
A lawsuit for the truth
Let us recall that TVN Television sued Słowo Niezależne, the publisher of the Niezalezna.pl portal, and editor-in-chief Grzegorz Wierzchołowski for quoting Tomasz Sakiewicz’s words on TVP Info. These included, among others: “They lie blatantly. […] TVN said that explosions, an attack, were ruled out. […] TVN provides information that protects Putin in the matter of the Smolensk disaster. It has helped to conceal the truth about Smolensk from the very beginning.”
The broadcaster is demanding PLN 100,000 for the TVN Foundation and an order prohibiting, for a period of one year, the dissemination, by any means and in any form, of information that “TVN lies,” “TVN provides information that protects Putin,” “TVN conceals the truth about the Smolensk disaster,” and that “TVN’s publications are manipulated.”