Abstract
A new media law is undermining press freedom and a long established liberal tradition.
On 21 December 2010, at 6.15 in the morning, Attila Mong did something unusual for a radio host: he held a minute of silence. Mong, who had been working for less than a year at Mr1-Kossuth, one of Hungary’s public, nominally independent radio stations, was protesting a law that would create a media authority with exceptionally wide-reaching powers. The media law, which took effect on 1 January, last year, less than two weeks after Mong’s protest, is one of the most controversial measures to have been enacted by the conservative nationalist government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The Fidesz party came to power two years ago with an unprecedented two-thirds parliamentary majority and has clashed repeatedly with the European Union over claims that it is consolidating power and destroying checks and balances.
Immediately after the minute of silence, the studio began filling with the station’s managers. When Mong’s shift on the morning news programme ended, he was summoned before Mr1’s bosses. He was suspended along with his producer, and an internal investigation was launched to discover whether the two had violated internal rules by airing their personal opinions. Ultimately, the investigation dragged on for months, until the expiry of Mong’s contract.
Mong does not regret the risk he took. He has been a journalist for 15 years in Hungary, mostly for a private radio station in Budapest called Info Radio, and has written several books about white collar crime. ‘I had this journalistic conscience problem, that I knew we had a media law which is a serious threat, the text is a serious threat,’ he told me earlier this year over lunch at a Budapest restaurant. ‘We don’t want to have young reporters in 15 years time to come to us and ask, “What did you do when you were there? You were a leading journalist, you were on air, on the public radio, the most popular program on public radio.” And I didn’t want young people to ask this question.’
The law in question creates a regulatory body – all of whose members have been appointed by Orban’s ruling Fidesz Party – that has the ability to impose crippling fines of up to $100,000 on journalists and news outlets for committing the nebulous misdeed of ‘offending human dignity’. In response to criticism from the European Commission and European Parliament, and in an attempt to convince critics that the 56 new regulations were no more onerous than those imposed by the rest of Europe, the Hungarian government produced a detailed response comparing its media law to others across the continent. But a recent report by the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University, relying upon experts in 20 European countries, found that ‘in a majority of examples, experts report that the Hungarian government’s references omit or inaccurately characterise relevant factors of the other countries’ regulatory systems, and as a result, the examples do not provide sufficient and/or equivalent comparisons to Hungary’s media regulation system’. In protest at the law, liberal Hungarian newspapers and magazines ran blank pages on their covers and on the homepages of their websites.
In addition to this, public service media has been purged of anyone suspected of harbouring critical views of the government and stacked with Fidesz loyalists. Such politicisation of state-funded media detracts from its professionalism; the BBC, so widely respected around the world, does not experience massive staff turnovers when a new government is elected. ‘They are all from the right wing,’ Mong tells me. ‘Before the elections they were working for right-wing publications, right-wing radio, so [they are] very much loyalists. Mong is no partisan, however. ‘You can find these kinds of people of course on both sides, on the left as well.’ Yet the degree to which public media has become a mouthpiece for the government is unparalleled in Hungary’s post-communist history.
During the previous, socialist-led government, the media was not nearly as politicised. As an example, Mong cites the fact that a 2006 speech delivered by the then prime minister to members of his party, in which he admitted that the government had lied ‘in the morning, at noon and at night’, was a story first aired by public radio. ‘Today it would be unimaginable to have a secret speech from Viktor Orban, and have the story broken by [public radio],’ he says. The government is also able to exercise influence over the media in more subtle ways. The Hungarian government is, by far, the biggest media advertiser in the country, from the national lottery to public transport. Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University who has written extensively about constitutional reform and media freedom in Hungary, refers to the ‘Lucky Joker rule’, a reference to one of the country’s most popular lottery games. By publishing advertisements in only Fidesz-friendly media, the government ‘communicate[s] where it is permissible for advertisers to advertise’ – in other words, it exerts pressure on all those companies that wish to win government contracts or avoid expensive tax audits. The government is therefore able to steer private advertising in the direction of those media outlets that are the least critical of it, leaving the opposition press scrounging for advertising revenue.
Demonstration against the new media law, parliamentary building, Budapest, 14 January 2011
Credit: Laszlo Balogh/Reuters
Peter Molnar was a classmate of Viktor Orban’s and a founding member of Fidesz. He left the party in the early 1990s when it lurched from the liberal centre to the nationalist right. The new media law is a betrayal of a long lost liberal tradition, he says, referring to the 12 demands that revolutionaries proposed to the Hapsburg Empire in 1848. ‘The text started with, “What does the Hungarian nation wish?”’ Molnar says. ‘And guess what the first point was about? Freedom of the press and no censorship.’ Fidesz and the reigning Hungarian right prefer to emphasise traditional symbols of nationalism – the crown of St Stephen, Christianity, the plight of Hungarian minorities dispersed in neighbouring countries; Molnar says that freedom of thought and conscience, no less prominent in Hungarian history, are being undermined. ‘With a healthy respect for facts, we just have to acknowledge, that’s the tradition of Hungary. Being Hungarian means being proud of that sentence. Being committed to that sentence, to that value.’
The media law and increasingly nationalist political atmosphere in Hungary has convinced some in the West that more serious steps should be taken in response. Former American Ambassador to Hungary Mark Palmer, Johns Hopkins University Professor Charles Gati, and Hungarian author Miklos Haraszti have suggested that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty should resume Hungarian-language broadcasts into the country, which it ceased in 1993 shortly after the fall of communism. Budget cuts to American international broadcasting, not to mention how such a provocative move might affect US-Hungarian bilateral relations, make that prospect unlikely.
The new media law is a betrayal of a long lost tradition
Predictably, given the harsh fines that the new media authority can impose, many Hungarian journalists have complained of the law’s ‘chilling effect’. Yet the Hungarian independent press seems as critical of Orban and Fidesz as ever. When I pointed out the seeming contradiction to Endre Bojtar, editor of the liberal weekly Magyar Narancs, he responded: ‘Don’t mix the cause with the effect.’ And he’s right. Just because no journalist has (yet) been hauled off to court does not mean there is no pressure on journalists to conform. Indeed, the parlous financial state of most Hungarian independent media – and its long-time dependence on an unofficial state subsidy via the government’s huge share of the advertising market – is one way in which Fidesz is slowly bringing about the demise of free media. ‘It provides an opportunity for arbitrary punishment all the time,’ Molnar says of the media law. ‘This chilling effect creates lots of self-censorship, which is unfortunately invisible or harder to notice.’
No state can have such a law on its books and expect to call itself a liberal democracy. Even if the government doesn’t opt to use such far-reaching powers, their existence poses a threat to the very notion of freedom of speech. And that threat should concern us, even if, at this point, it remains hypothetical. As Andre Bojtar says of the Fidesz government, ‘They always go as far as they can, as far as the next war.’