March 29, 2024

Hungarian News Media Fight Laws of Silence

Mr. Bolgar, a gentlemanly Rush Limbaugh of the left, opined that the rightist party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban was undermining the national currency, imposing a nonsensical “weather forecast” tax on broadcasters, and muzzling the news media. Listeners accused the government of being power hungry and vengeful.

“Orban is very clever, but very evil,” a listener said. “We’re dealing with arrogance on such a scale here that Mount Everest is a molehill in comparison.”

Such mudslinging would seem a healthy sign of a free and vibrant news media in this former Communist country, except that Klubradio has found itself at the center of what its director, Andras Arato, calls a government-backed war to weaken and silence the station.

The clash has become emblematic of what critics call a bald attempt by the Orban government to tighten its grip on the news media, the judiciary, the central bank and education, and the inability of the European Union, which Hungary joined in 2004, to restrain a government not cleaving to the bloc’s democratic standards.

For two years, Hungary’s news media council, which hands out radio frequencies and is stacked with Mr. Orban’s supporters, refused to renew Klubradio’s long-term frequency, despite three court rulings in the station’s favor. Instead, it initially awarded Klubradio’s frequency to an unknown broadcaster that then mysteriously disappeared.

The regulator consistently came up with seemingly spurious arguments to avoid granting the license, Mr. Arato said, including deeming Klubradio’s application invalid because the blank back pages were not signed. The broadcaster operated for two years on two-month licenses, bleeding cash because the uncertainty scared away advertisers. Advertising revenue plummeted to $10,000 a month from $200,000 in 2008, and today the station is barely scraping by.

Late last week — after the fourth court ruling, a grass-roots campaign by thousands of listeners and mounting international pressure — the council finally backed down and awarded Klubradio the long-term frequency.

“The government doesn’t like to hear any criticism,” Mr. Arato said. “So it tried to starve us to death.”

Among the biggest concerns to Mr. Orban’s critics is a restrictive news media law, which has come under criticism from the European Commission, the Council of Europe and press watchdog groups for giving the governing party excessive control over the regulation of news media outlets.

The government has responded by revising the law, including a provision that would have given police officials the power to demand the name of a journalist’s source.

Journalists remain wary, but opinion is also divided as to how seriously anyone can muzzle the news media in the age of Twitter and Facebook.

“Under Communism, there was one state channel, and the government could stop it,” said Akos Balogh, editor in chief of Mandiner, a liberal Web site. “But now if you try and block anything, it will just come out some other way. So the reaction to the media laws is as exaggerated as the law itself.”

Mr. Orban, a charismatic father of five whose bold call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary in 1989 made him a regional hero, is now being recast as an authoritarian intent on eroding the checks and balances of democratic government. Since coming to power in 2010 with a two-thirds majority, he has adroitly tapped into widespread discontent with a post-1989 order that many Hungarians feel has failed to deliver on its promises.

Last week, Mr. Orban’s party, Fidesz, defied warnings from the European Union and the U.S. State Department and pushed through an amendment to a new Fidesz-drafted constitution that, among other things, discards the rulings of the constitutional court made before 2012.

That move followed Mr. Orban’s appointment in early March of a close ally to head the central bank, his former economics minister, Gyorgy Matolcsy; the decision raised concerns that the bank would become open to political interference.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/world/europe/20iht-hungary20.html?partner=rss&emc=rss