The country’s television has become an arena in recent battles between the Polish authorities and European institutions, which see a quarter-century of democracy at stake in a country that in so many ways led the fight against Soviet-bloc Communism.

The 47-nation Council of Europe, the Continent’s leading human rights body, has demanded transparent procedures for selecting and appointing the new National Media Council. Members of the media council should be qualified, independent and reflect social diversity, the Council of Europe said, and content should also be impartial and diverse. A proposal for dismissal of middle management should be abandoned, it added.

The timing of that middle management purge seems already to have been pushed back to late September as Poland comes under the sway of two big events in the international spotlight: the NATO summit meeting in Warsaw on Friday and Saturday, and a visit by Pope Francis.

Poland wants both events to go off unsullied by criticism from European arbiters. The Europeans, in turn, insist that they are not, as the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Nils Muiznieks, put it, “picking on Poland.”