Suppressing the Press in Hungary
BRUNER, RICHARD W.
STALINIST TACTICS Suppressing the Press in Hungary BY RICHARD W. BRUNER Budapest HUNGARIANS LEARNED this fall that their post-Communist democracy, not quite four years old, is a fragile...
...In our conversation he said he meant a "palace revolt" by the radical Right in the MDF...
...Most of the films shown were produced in the U.S...
...Budapest has so far resisted all efforts to resolve the crisis...
...For advertisers this is a stupid situation...
...When the hecklers refused to quiet down, he picked up his speech and walked off...
...On October 25...
...The dismissals prompted Sony Managing Director Howard Shephard to issue a statement declaring, "The evaluation results...
...As the popularity rating of Antall's dominant party...
...Nahlik sent it off to Sony Broadcast International in Britain for scrutiny...
...seem to have been taken out of context...
...Kepes is convinced the sudden hullabaloo about Goncz' hecklers was set off to provide an excuse for Bano's suspension...
...Not surprisingly, the approach seems to be backfiring...
...Kepes has an explanation...
...Magyar Forum...
...NAHLIK IMMEDIATELY set about stifling dissent and reducing American TV productions...
...The American dominance will, in this way, fall back to 30 per cent maximum...
...An employee at an independent production company also confided that Hungarian television is massively behind in its payments...
...Embassy here is known to be "alarmed," and is trying to persuade the government to reinstate the people it has fired...
...Months later, after Nahlik took over as MTV's acting president, the Right-wing editors of Channel l's A Her (The Week) accused Egyenleg editor Andras Bano of tampering with the video footage to make the skinheads look worse than they were...
...To maneuver around Goncz, Antall charged first Gombar and then Hankiss with "financial mismanagement...
...Band not only flatly denied having done any doctoring, but during the argument with Nahlik leading up to his suspension had turned over the tape for examination...
...Andras Kepes, the head of the Hungarian television journalists' association, thinks Nahlik may be playing a Machiavellian game...
...He named Vice President Nahlik and Hungarian Radio Vice President Laszlo Csucs, another MDF apparatchik, as acting presidents of their respective organizations...
...The events surrounding the firing and the work stoppage illustrate the nature of the conflict between Hungary's journalists and the governing coalition...
...Hirado (Newscast), on Channel 1. is distinctly pro-government and...
...Esti Egyenleg reporters and cameramen were on hand and reported what happened that evening...
...When you look at the number of programs that now rate 20 per cent or more of the audience, you can count them on one hand, whereas last year there were 15 or 20...
...Nahlik, an engineer by training, is a reliable MDF apparatchik...
...Upon assuming her new post, she banned in-house gatherings and issued an order restricting stories about what has come to be called the "media war" to those approved by top management...
...The latest MTV upheaval has its roots in an October 23, 1992 event memorializing the 1956 Hungarian uprising against invading Soviet forces...
...Tim Scott Hunter, media buyer for the Lintas advertising agency in Budapest, characterized Nahlik as being "to the Right of Istvan Csurka...
...The reason seemed so spurious that an hour before air time the show's staff decided not to broadcast...
...Now, suddenly, journalists realize the new [Antall] government wants to do the same thing the previous system did in its worst period...
...Klara Babiczky, a writer for Istvan Csurka's reactionary newspaper...
...the morning newspaper digest segment of the popular Kronika program was canceled by acting president Laszlo Csucs for summarizing an article by the deposed Elemer Hankiss in the country's leading liberal daily, Magyar Hirlap (Hungarian Journal...
...Goncz bore the insults silently...
...In the '70s there was a sort of Stalinist reaction to Kadar's opening up the system...
...That was the start of the so-called 'new economic system.' initiated by [Communist Party boss Janos] Kadar...
...As he started his speech, however, a handful of skinheads and Right-wingers began heckling him because of his liberal opposition to a witch hunt focusing on old Communists...
...Overloading viewers with politics, he suggested to me, might reduce their interest in the upcoming elections—expected some time between March and May—to the point where fewer than 50 per cent of the eligible voters go to the polls...
...In the course of an intense campaign begun in January '92 to bring down Hankiss and his Hungarian Radio counterpart, Csaba Gombar—both, incidentally, Antall appointees—the government emptied a whole bag of ugly tricks...
...It concluded with a march to the statue of Lajos Kossuth, the great 19th-century revolutionary hero and advocate of a free press, where a symbolic petition was left...
...according to a second insider, "treats its audience like schoolchildren...
...Two years ago his insecurity led him to engineer the launching of the blatantly pro-government newspaper Uj Magyarorszag (New Hungary...
...Antall refused, throwing his full weight behind Nahlik and Csucs...
...A documentary producer, writer and program host, the 45-year-old Kepes, who spent two years as a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford and New York University in the mid-'80s, has developed a healthy respect for the First Amendment...
...We simply cannot let that happen...
...Although Sony found there was no evidence of tampering, it did say the tape had been edited?as, of course, all videotapes are before they are broadcast...
...Whatever, this October 26—more than a year after the disputed program aired—Nahlik suspended Bano...
...He told a recent press conference there is a danger of "a possible coup by the far Right...
...In the case of TV news programs, Egyenleg has been considered by most sophisticated observers to be fairly objective in its coverage of the government...
...Nahlik does have a programming policy...
...Nahlik compounded his outrage by replacing Bano with a notoriously incompetent Right-winger, Laszlo Muranyi, leader of a pro-government journalists' association...
...An IP staffer explained: "Whatever Hankiss did, Nahlik has decided is no good...
...The overwhelming majority of Hungarian journalists believe freedom of the press and their integrity are at stake...
...One of Nahlik's own employees told me: "They don't have any programming policy...
...Neither man fell...
...The effect has been to reintroduce a kind of Stalinist control over television...
...Nahlik locked them out of their offices the next morning and arranged to have Channel 1 news programs rebroadcast on Channel 2 in place of Esti Egyenleg...
...Hankiss wanted competition between the two channels," an employee requesting anonymity told me...
...More important, in his determination to exert as much news control as possible, he has repeatedly prevented Parliament's compliance with deadlines set by the Constitutional Court for passage of a media law that would allow the establishment of a third, privately-owned television channel and spell out the responsibilities of government-operated television and radio...
...Since the end of October, the media here have been in turmoil over censorship, firings, lockouts, and walkouts at the still government-owned television and radio stations...
...But President Arpad Goncz, an author (and translator of John Updike's novels) as well as a former prominent dissident, refused to give his required approval...
...A technical evaluation of Egyenleg's videotape, he contended, had determined it was apocryphal...
...the long-simmering feud boiled over when Gabor Nahlik...
...Csucs countered staff protests by hiring a new news editor...
...From the day he took office on May 23, 1990, Prime Minister Jozsef Antall has been at war with the press...
...The U.S...
...Pointing to what he termed the MTV chief's pro-Western bias, he kept up a steady barrage of attacks that seemed to influence the government...
...In addition, the executive board of the International Press Institute, headquartered in neighboring Vienna, has sent a letter to the Antall government saying it "supports the protests of the Hungarian radio and TV journalists...
...He went on to maintain that the police had cleared out the skinheads before Goncz started speaking, and that Bano inserted the scene showing skinheads in Nazi regalia out of sequence...
...She was wrong in one respect...
...Entertainment shows are merely placed here and there to fill in the gaps between the political programs...
...Richard W. Bruner, a new contributor to The New Leader, is a freelance journalist who is based in Budapest...
...Hankiss wanted competition [between the two channels] to improve programming and get more advertising revenue...
...In Washington, the Defense Forum Foundation's recent "Round-table on Hungary and Central Europe" commented that "by refusing to accept the organic tie-up between democracy and a free media, the government embraces the failed centralizing policies of a previous authoritarian regime...
...The whole thing is Nahlik's idea...
...Istvan Csurka's new far-Right political party...
...Again, the purpose was competitiveness...
...A featured speaker was President Arpad Goncz, who spent five years in prison for his participation in that revolution...
...But in the '80s Communism was not so repressive...
...the acting president of Hungarian Television (MTV), suspended Andras Bano, editor of the popular Channel 2 news show Esti Egyenleg (Evening Balance...
...He therefore hired Information Public is (IP), a French media group, to sell commercial time on Channel 1, and had Channel 2 set up another sales staff of its own...
...It's just politics...
...Finally, this past October 26...
...He characterized his decision as "recapturing" Hungarian TV Along with viewers, the new policy is losing revenue, the IP staffer notes...
...President Goncz urged him to seek a compromise...
...They are reverting to a kind of Stalinism...
...Nahlik's notion is to have no competition, because both are public service channels...
...STALINIST TACTICS Suppressing the Press in Hungary BY RICHARD W. BRUNER Budapest HUNGARIANS LEARNED this fall that their post-Communist democracy, not quite four years old, is a fragile mechanism whose underpinnings are vulnerable to manipulation by the politicians holding power...
...If that were to happen, Kepes continued, a new election would have to be held and the present government would be able to stay in power for a little while longer...
...and objects to "this attempt to gain control over the media...
...Two hundred Hungarian Radio journalists signed a petition decrying the "violation of the principles of public service broadcasting...
...In mid-November, upon Antall's return from several weeks in a German hospital for treatment of lymphoma...
...Hankiss also was convinced that advertising revenue was the lifeblood of broadcasting...
...Practically none of Hankiss' ideas, including his attraction to American program material, sat well with the MDF's leaders...
...Csurka will not take over the government," he assured me...
...Almost simultaneously Hungarian Radio went through a similar brawl...
...People are switching off their television sets by the thousands...
...So around midyear the Prime Minister tried to fire them...
...Hunter and executives at other agencies were stunned when Nahlik refused to provide them with advance scheduling information...
...A few days later, several thousand students staged a similar demonstration and march...
...and on October 30 they joined MTV colleagues in a public demonstration to denounce the State's tactics...
...There's been a 20 per cent drop in viewership since March...
...We are working hard to convince management to accept a fixed schedule...
...We were really fighting for a free press...
...Especially missed is the Saturday Night Movie syndicated by Columbia Tri-Star...
...The Center-Right coalition government says it is simply defending itself against reckless media criticism aimed at destroying Hungary's image as the most politically stable former Soviet bloc country...
...Journalists were able to play an important role in the transition [away from Communism], especially radio journal-ists...
...It's common knowledge among Hungarians," Hunter says, "that the two TV channels are heavily political and weighted in favor of the Center-Right coalition...
...He wants to give viewers a heavy dose of "public service" broadcasts that cast the government in a good light...
...The Prime Minister now was able to take over...
...Justice and Life, has accused Goncz of violating the Constitution in attempting to resolve the confrontration, and also has expressed its heartfelt support for the two broadcast administrators...
...But Nahlik told an interviewer, "It has been decided that in the future 50 per cent of the programs will be Hungarian, 20 per cent European, and the rest from other parts of the world...
...Other journalists who covered the event said the video was an accurate reflection of what occurred...
...By the time I was a teenager in the late '60s, though, the system was more open...
...Nahlik seized on this to justify giving Bano and three assistant editors their walking papers...
...Last January he replaced El-emer Hankiss, who not only tolerated diversity but strongly encouraged it...
...A recent independent study by a group of sociologists found Hirado heavily biased, and rated Egyenleg almost completely impartial...
...Held in front of MTV's offices, the protest attracted some 6,000 other Hungarians...
...By January '93, though, Hankiss and Gombar, frustrated because they could not do their jobs, quit...
...Of course, we had to be careful...
...They would learn too late, they argued to no avail, that time had been bought for a perfume commercial in the middle of a soccer broadcast...
...Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), has nevertheless drastically declined to less than 10 per cent, he has increased his pressure on the media...
...And they were especially irksome to Istvan Csurka, a rabid Right-winger whose passionate anti-Semitism and nationalism was too much even for the MDF, which kicked him out of the party...
...When he complained that there was "whining, bleating Yiddish sing-song" on Hungarian TV, Egyenleg's staff protested and announced it would not prepare that evening's broadcast...
...The piece predicted that the government's control of the electronic media would not last long...
...For a few minutes...
...Associates say that every morning he scrutinizes the newspapers and rages at any negative commentary...
...The State Audit Office, after lengthy investigations, could find no irregularities in their books...
...The first few years of Communism here were really terrifying," he told me...
...During the 1990 parliamentary elections she was a Hungarian Radio reporter, but was fired for being too biased...
...One of the remarkable aspects of the whole sequence of events has been the determination of the majority of broadcast journalists—backed by their print counterparts—to firmly establish a free press in the most elementary sense of that term...
Vol. 76 • November 1993 • No. 13
