Staff at Hungary state media kept record of news manipulation; new president to be elected next week
A diligent group of journalists at the state news agency MTI secretly spent years collecting information detailing how news reports were manipulated by Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party and its allies during his 16 years in power, the new regime running Hungary’s public service media, MTVA, said in a statement this week. According to Telex.hu, these reporters and news editors, who call themselves the Pro Domo working group, spent more than 10 years collecting correspondence, emails and chat messages proving how the news was manipulated, falsified and suppressed at MTI, which was contained in a 482-page document handed over to MTVA’s new leadership. The working group divided the cases into several categories: stories that were suppressed or written under orders; stories that were discarded; manipulated materials; censored and falsified news stories. MTVA released a 15-page excerpt that is a selection of typical examples from the material. According to Telex.hu, instances include an MTI reporter writing a story in 2022 about a Russian troll farm being exposed by the British government, but couldn’t find the article afterwards, so a colleague approached one of the editors to ask what had happened to it. The response was: “It’s been discarded”. There were also blacklists: citing the German newspaper Die Welt was forbidden as were international NGOs Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. “Accurate, balanced, and impartial reporting is a fundamental requirement of Hungarian media regulation, the Public Service Code, and of European regulations protecting media freedom. The new leadership of the public media is releasing these documents as part of the ongoing review, in order to strengthen transparency and restore the public’s trust, so that such propagandistic practices cannot be repeated in the future,” MTVA said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the parliamentary group of Hungary’s governing Tisza party proposed on Wednesday that parliament should elect the country’s new president on August 11. The resignation of Hungary’s previous president, Tamas Sulyok, an appointee of the previous government, was a key campaign pledge of the new prime minister, Peter Magyar, whose Tisza won a landslide victory at the April 12 general election. Magyar initially tried to get the world’s greatest female chess player of all time, Judit Polgar, to accept the nomination to be the country’s next president, but she declined the offer. Any Hungarian over the age of 35 with voting rights can become president, but Magyar has said his chosen candidate – given Tisza’s huge majority in parliament the de facto winner – must be independent of political parties. Circulated names include the former justice minister Peter Barandy, the anti-corruption campaigner and former MP Akos Hadhazy, Methodist pastor Gabor Ivanyi, economist Peter Rona and former judge Adrienn Laczo. Magyar has also been photographed recently with Botond Fulop, the lawyer who uncovered the pardon scandal that ended president Katalin Novak’s political career, and historian Ignac Romsics. Another name being floated is Peter Marki-Zay, the leader of the opposition in the 2022 general election who lost in a landslide to Orban. Popular choices on social media, where much of the speculation has played out, include reality TV stars, bodybuilders, the Victoria’s Secret model Barbara Palvin, and Erno Rubik, inventor of the Rubik’s cube. But the most popular candidate in one anonymous poll, the Guardian reported, was Andras Arato, a retired electrical engineer who found global online fame as a meme: Hide the Pain Harold.
