| Polish Radio | |
| Native Name: | Polskie Radio S.A. |
| Type: | Sole-shareholder company of the State Treasury |
| Industry: | Mass media |
| Founder: | Zygmunt Chamiec and Tadeusz Sułowski |
| Area Served: | Poland |
| Key People: | Paweł Majcher (general director) |
| Products: | Broadcasting, radio, web portals |
| Services: | Radio broadcasting |
| Location City: | Al. Niepodległości 77/85, 00–977 Warsaw |
| Location Country: | Poland |
The Polish Radio (PR; Polish: Polskie Radio, PR) is a national public-service radio broadcasting organization of Poland, founded in 1925. It is owned by the State Treasury of Poland. On 27 December 2023, the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, due to the President's veto on the financing of the company, placed it in liquidation.[1]
Polskie Radio was founded on 18 August 1925 and began making regular broadcasts from Warsaw on 18 April 1926.
Before the Second World War, Polish Radio operated one national channel – broadcast from 1931 from one of Europe's most powerful longwave transmitters, situated at Raszyn just outside Warsaw and destroyed in 1939 due to invasion of German Army – and nine regional stations:
A tenth regional station was planned for Łuck, but the outbreak of war meant that it never opened.
The invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union led to the destruction of the network in September 1939, with its final broadcast being a performance of Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. posth. by Władysław Szpilman. Years later, Szpilman played the same piece for the reopening of the station.[2]
After the war, Polskie Radio was reconstructed with the assistance of the Soviet Red Army, which valued radio as a propaganda medium. It came under the tutelage of the state public broadcasting body Komitet do Spraw Radiofonii "Polskie Radio" (later "Polskie Radio i Telewizja" – PRT, Polish Radio and Television). This body was dissolved in 1992, Polskie Radio S.A. and Telewizja Polska S.A. becoming politically dependent corporations, each of which was admitted to full active membership of the European Broadcasting Union on 1 January 1993 with the merger of EBU and OIRT.
Polskie Radio also operates 17 regional radio stations (operating on FM and DAB+), located in:
Polskie Radio offers city stations in:
All city stations but Radio Szczecin Extra are being broadcast on FM and in Internet, while Radio Szczecin Extra is available only in Internet and via DAB+.
Polskie Radio also offers regional digital-only stations (all operating in Internet and DAB+ only) in:
Polskie Radio Trójka has been compiling Polish music charts since 1982 – in an era before there were any commercial sales or airplay rankings – making them a significant record of musical popularity in Poland. Chart archives dating from 1982 are available to the public via the station's website.[13]
Czesław Miłosz, recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, worked as a literary programmer at Polish Radio Wilno in 1936.[14]
Flagship commercial radio stations in Poland: