World press freedom day – Hungary

The 3rd of May is world press freedom day- an important day to reflect. At the European Press Prize we are very proud of the brave and great journalists who share their stories, opinions and investigations with us. Especially since press freedom is decreasing in Europe. We hope to celebrate and support many more great journalists in the future. 

In the spirit of reflection, we have asked laureate Szabolcs Panyi to share his thoughts on the current situation in his homecountry Hungary – the country where we held our 2018 award ceremony. He used 10 numbers to explain the struggle for press freedom. 

A matter of silent asphyxiation

Ten numbers to explain the struggle for press freedom in Hungary

21 million

In 2015, Hungary’s state-owned export-import bank (Exim) loaned 21 million euros to Magyar Broadcasting Co., a company owned by former Hollywood producer and current government proxy Andrew G. Vajna. The US-Hungarian dual citizen used this cheap loan to purchase TV2, Hungary’s second largest privately owned TV channel. In the spirit of Fox News, Vajna soon turned the channel into a viciously pro-government propaganda outlet. 

Since then it has become a trademark scheme of the Orbán government to give public money, either through public contracts or through cheap loans of state-owned banks, to government-aligned businessmen. They then buy up the remainder of Hungary’s independent media. The only two influential mainstream independent outlets still existing, ánd having a wide reach in Hungary, are RTL Klub (TV) and Index.hu (online).

40,700

Independent media in Hungary – and especially investigative journalists – nowadays partly seek refuge in the non-profit sector, relying on subscriptions and donations in order to avoid ownership and political pressure. Examples are non-profit investigative centre Direkt36, they managed to collect 40,700 euros in their recent fundraising campaign; Atlatszo.hu, another Hungarian non-profit investigative outlet that has more than 3,700 subscribers; the independent news site 444.hu runs innovative campaigns and the financial support from their audience is increasing. 

13,000

In March 2018, Index.hu journalist Gergely Nyilas was convicted for forging public documents and misleading the authorities. He was sentenced to pay the costs of his trial: 13,000 forints (40 euros). Nyilas carried out undercover reporting back in 2015, when, at the peak of the migration crisis, he disguised himself as an asylum seeker from Kyrgyzstan. The case of Nyilas sets a worrying precedent because the court refused to apply an existing Hungarian law. This law grants immunity to journalists who break certain rules while doing investigative reporting that have a genuine public interest.

As OSCE representative Harlem Désir pointed out, the Hungarian journalist’s goal was to “inform about the Hungarian authorities’ treatment of asylum seekers” as “the media were banned from accessing refugee centres in the country, and he had no other means of collecting the necessary information”. 

100

Government-acquired outlets have become part of a centrally coordinated propaganda machine. Journalists with real experience and knowledge in their profession have either been fired or have quit. Government-aligned Hungarian outlets have started to increasingly copy and implement ‘narratives’ created by the Kremlin which are used in Russian state-controlled media. For example, to support Viktor Orbán’s smear campaign against Hungarian-American investor and philanthropist George Soros. Orbán’s media empire has quoted hacked documents published by ‘DC Leaks’, a Russian military intelligence operation, over a hundred times. The site is now defunct.

62

According to G7 (an independent non-profit Hungarian economic magazine), 62 % of all sold newspapers is published by government-aligned publishing companies. These companies – owned either by right-wing businessmen or straw men fronting for top government politicians – also have a 62 % share in Hungary’s radio market, 32 % TV, and 19 % in online media.

The government’s influence, however, is much higher if we only examine those publications and outlets that cover politics. When taking this into account, the G7 study found, government-aligned companies have a 77 % share in print, 62 % in radio, 49 % TV, and 41 % in the online market. 

15

By the end of 2017, all independent, local (county) newspapers were eliminated. With recent purchases, 15 out of 19 Hungarian counties now have their daily papers owned by either a company linked to Andrew G. Vajna or to Lőrinc Mészáros, Orbán’s childhood friend – who is accused by opposition parties as simply being a straw man of the prime minister. An Austrian businessman, who has a history of cutting deals with the government, owns the three remaining local dailies. There is one county left with no local daily newspaper at all.

The recent Hungarian parliamentary election clearly show that the government’s media operation was pretty successful in articulating their anti-migrant political agenda to rural voters, for which the buy-up of local newspapers was crucial. In Budapest, the government only won 6 seats out of 18. In the countryside, however, Orbán’s party has won 85 out of 88 seats.

11

It has been over 11 years since Viktor Orbán gave his last proper interview to Hungary’s largest independent news site, Index.hu. The prime minister avoids to speak with journalists who ask critical questions. Only loyal journalists are handed the microphone during his press conferences. The only place where critical journalists still have a chance to address him directly is in Brussels, whenever he holds a press conference for international media after the European Council summits.

2

In recent years, 2 out of Hungary’s 4 traditional national daily newspapers have been forced to shut down. In 2016, left-liberal daily Népszabadság was closed. Just a few weeks ago Orbán’s best friend-turned-worst-enemy oligarch Lajos Simicska decided to terminate the circulation of Magyar Nemzet, his conservative and radically anti-government newspaper. 

1

Despite all the work done by Hungarian investigative journalists, uncovered wrongdoings rarely have political or legal consequences – it is mostly the journalists and the outlets that get sued. There was only one case when thorough reporting managed to take down a top politician in Hungary, which happened in the early years of the Orbán-era.

In 2012, president of the republic Pál Schmitt was forced to resign, after a months-long investigation by hvg.hu showed that the president plagiarized huge parts of his PhD dissertation.

0

Even with all the troubles in Hungary’s media environment, these difficulties are really nothing compared to what the media and journalists in Egypt, Turkey, Russia or other alleged ‘illiberal’ role model countries of Viktor Orbán have gone through. The Hungarian government and its proxies have never crossed the red line of attacking, jailing, or killing journalists. The number of physically threatened journalists is Hungary is still zero. 

Even something like the murder of Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak is unimaginable in my country, where violence in politics and business has been extremely low since the late ’90s. The Hungarian government, however, has found a more civilised and subtle way of silencing its critics – by threatening and corrupting media owners, and by killing newspapers instead of the journalists.

Szabolcs Panyi was nominated for the European Press Prize in 2018, with an investigation about the Russian influence on the refurbishment of Budapest’s old Soviet metro cars. 

The 2018 European Press Prize award ceremony – held at the Open Society Archives in Budapest, Hungary.

Photo made by Daniel Vegel. 

Keynote Miklós Haraszti

We are very proud that Miklós Harastzi was the keynote speaker at the European Press Prize award ceremony, held the 14th of March in Budapest. Read his important speech below. 

“Dear friends of freedom of the press,

Many of you are coming from countries where the otherwise democratic, pluralistic media is burdened by novel dangers, such as manipulative fake news, the fragmentation of the public through social media, the monopolistic harnessing of advertisement revenues by the big-data companies, and, as a result, a further weakening of the legacy media.

Now, your speaker tonight is envying you — and at the same time he is praising your wisdom to have come with your award ceremony to one of the countries of Europe already taken over by a higher stage of despoilment.

Your precious prizes honouring quality journalism are truly meaningful in a country which is, by now, beyond the mere spreading of politically motivated fake news. Instead, we have a dominating fake media, sustained by the government from taxpayer money. In short, welcome to the new propaganda state inside Europe, donning a quasi-democratic and quasi-market-economy camouflage.

“Your precious prizes honouring quality journalism are truly meaningful in a country which is, by now, beyond the mere spreading of politically motivated fake news.”

Here you find an audience which can fully appreciate the dangers that the established democracies face when outside forces pump fake news into the public space.

We share your indignation hearing about the most impertinent of all fake news, which is when populist politicians cry fake news, slandering the work of responsible journalists. The honest media has become an enemy because it is NOT fake.

“The honest media has become an enemy because it is NOT fake.”

But what you will experience in this country is not any more manipulations of social media, utilizing commercial algorithms of the big-data companies to distribute their garbage.

Instead, the illiberal propaganda state has become a troll factory itself. Its main objective is not simply the spreading of “alternative facts” – the aim is to squeeze out all alternatives to fake news.

As you can guess, this cannot be achieved within the media production cycle alone. To achieve this, you need fake democracy, a fake market, and fake constitutionalism.

I recommend studying the propaganda state as inherent in the warning signs you already experience at home.

Notwithstanding their camouflage of an elective democracy, these states are able to achieve a deep-seated censorship and propaganda effect, comparable to what the erstwhile totalitarian states had accomplished.

How does it work? Hanna Arendt has told us, and the method has not changed. The essence, she told us, was a concentrated state effort to actually build the fake realities, and then give up on argumentation, and only finger point at that convenient new reality. Think of the fake civil war in Ukraine to convince the public of a “fascist danger”, or the building of the border fence in Hungary, in order to convince the nation that it has to be defended, from the danger of an alien invasion and a fake Soros plan.

Naturally, Hanna Arendt added, for the propaganda state to succeed, it also had to annihilate access to real news. It was one of the most sobering moments of my life when I realized that that method also works in an elective democracy, by the monopolization of broadcasting, and by fragmenting and manipulating the online social media.

In the 1990s, when I served as head of the media freedom watchdog arm of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, I was forced to realize that the decline of media freedom went far beyond individual violations of earlier recognized standards. It was a transition from democracy, rather than to it. It was the global resurrection of methodical state censorship in a democratic disguise. This type of media control is globally taking root as a mainstay of illiberal and neo-authoritarian governance.

The quasi-democratic state censorship systems do not generally outlaw free speech, unlike the few remaining ideological tyrannies, such as China or Iran. Nevertheless, the first liberty that is taken away in all post-Cold War fake democracies is the local version of the First Amendment. Take as an example the constitutional changes in EU member states Hungary and Poland.

“The first liberty that is taken away in all post-Cold War fake democracies is the local version of the First Amendment.”

With the help – and under the pretext – of majoritarian parliamentary decisions, they simultaneously curtail all four basic media freedoms:

–  The right to opinion, limiting of what could be said in public;
–  The right to fact-finding, or the right to know, by continuously tightening access to public-interest information;
–  The right to choose, or most simply, pluralism of the media;
–  And the right to connect, by reterritorializing the regulation of the internet-based global media.

The forces bent on governing with the help of fake media are already inside the European wall.

They have won elections not only in the US or the post-Soviet states. They have won referenda in the Netherlands and in the United Kingdom.

I can only agree with our prime minister Viktor Orbán when he treats his new system as a model for all nations in Europe: except his dream is my nightmare.

In 2010 he claimed an electoral revolution had washed away the chaos of liberal democracy — declaring instead a System of National Cooperation — and officially obliged all state institutions to visibly placard that name on their walls.

It only took four more years for him to categorize his new system as an “illiberal democracy”, borrowing Fareed Zakaria’s term, created in 1997 to describe a new way of dismantling democracy. Orbán in 2014 reinterpreted the term as meaning real democracy after decades of western mental imperialism, and named Russia and Turkey as its pioneers.

Here is what he has done in the years since coming to power, demonstrating how fragile our beloved media freedoms are. He:

–  passed a one-party Constitution, against the will of all other parties, only 25 years after the fall of Communism;
–  packed the Constitutional Court
–  passed a media law which put the regulation and licensing of all the media in the hands of an untransparent Media Council with 5 people on board, delegated solely by his party;
–  transformed the media markets as well, by overtly passing taxpayer money to chosen oligarchs, tasked to buy up independent media and turn them into government mouthpieces.
–  symbolically, and sarcastically, he made the Mayor of his native village and casino magnate of his choice, the owners of all of the countryside print media. Neither of the two oligarchs had anything to do with the press before 2014;
–  directed the quasi-totality of state advertisement to the government’s media oligarchs
–  overnight obliterated from existence the country’s best newspaper, Népszabadság, just when it had become a powerful investigative team;
–  made the public service media and the state news agency into a department of the government;
–  just barely a half a year ago, he practically banned the last free offline media – the public posters, so crucial for free elections – by passing a law that made their regulation the jurisdiction of the municipalities, overwhelmingly led by his party.

Dear friends, with this litany I did not mean to give another demonstration of Hungarian pessimism. And it was certainly not meant to dismiss as lightweight the dangers looming over the media of more established democracies.

On the contrary, I wished to stress our common experience that democracy’s institutions must sooner or later get into trouble if the trust in the media is shaken. I wished to assure you that in this country, however heavy the assault of illiberal populism and crony capitalism, the trust in a shared sense of media freedom is alive and ready to strike back.

“The trust in a shared sense of media freedom is alive and ready to strike back.”

It is good to hear that many editors and journalists in the world have started to develop the tools and the cooperation necessary to defend real news and journalistic ethics.

Your prestigious award is one of those tools. We need to celebrate the heroes of free and professional journalism. Free speech was the beginning of democracy, and it is also its finest product. Today, the media are the ultimate frontiers in defending freedom in society. 

We need not wait until the traditional political process is no longer able to put speech freedoms and checks and balances back to work – as happens under fully-fledged illiberal regimes.

Please give special attention to the investigative arm of the “artillery of the press”. Illiberal media governance sometimes does not mind the proliferation of opinions, but their nemesis is facts about corruption and human rights abuses. Please also defend the institutions that enforce transparency and justice.

And let me finish this by paying tribute to the brave investigative journalists of Slovakia, who at the price of their own lives gave us a lesson about the force of fact-finding journalism. Just as did the Slovak nation, with their mass protests against the mere possibility of turning the republic into a nepotistic fiefdom.

And now let’s greet the European Press Prize awardees of 2018.”

Miklós Haraszti  is a Hungarian journalist, human rights advocate, university professor and writer. He served as OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media  for four years. In 2012 he was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus. As a professor at Columbia Law School and the Central European University, Miklós Haraszti lectures on democratisation and media politics. 

Photo made by Daniel Vegel