• The News may be good in America, but it's bad in Hungary
    9 replies, posted
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/opinion/hungary-viktor-orban-press-freedom.html When I visited Hungary recently, I knew I was entering a waning democracy that’s become increasingly authoritarian. I knew that Prime Minister Viktor Orban won a third term in April by convincing voters that a phantasmic combination of Muslim migrants, the Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros and European Union bureaucrats was coming to get them. But I only understood how Mr. Orban pulled this off when I spoke to Hungarian journalists. They explained that Mr. Orban first criticized the press for being biased against him. Then he and his allies took over most of it, and switched to running stories that promote Mr. Orban’s populist agenda and his party, Fidesz. This happened fast. The investigative website Atlatszo estimates that more than 500 Hungarian media titles are now controlled by Mr. Orban and his friends; in 2015, only 23 of them were. Loyalty trumps experience: Hungary’s biggest media mogul is a former pipe fitter from Mr. Orban’s hometown. In some cases, Orban allies bought publications and shut them down. One morning in 2016, journalists at Nepszabadsag, one of Hungary’s biggest dailies, were simply locked out of their offices. Its new owner, an Austrian businessman, claimed financial problems; the paper had just run a series of articles exposing government corruption. Other news organizations were bought and transformed from within. Some now reportedly take their talking points directly from the government. Recent headlines at Origo — once a respected online news site — were a numbing assortment of articles about migrants wreaking havoc on various European cities and conspiracies about Mr. Soros. Technically filed under opinion pieces, but it has some interesting details so I thought it was interesting to look at, as the article points out the free press is under attack in many countries right now. Although not as noticeable, the same thing is happening in America that's happened in Hungary and is likely going to happen in Brazil.
World is a fuck
When can we start a new game?
Several million years after the ashes cool.
Born to die.
Kill Em All 2018
I am trash man Also when are people gonna start offing dictators because it never happens fast enough
When was the last time it was great in Hungary? Fuck Fidesz. Fuck Orban. Let our brothers live in peace
Not really a good idea normally. Look at Murbarak in Egypt or Gaddafi in Libya. Those countries are now far worse.
The article makes a very important point about how government advertising can be a huge leverage in certain countries. Print media is dying everywhere, and as it turned out, even the largest newspapers rely on these ads heavily. Pull them, and you can simply make them go bankrupt/buy them out. It is a bit overdramatic about access to independent news though. The most viewed TV channel (owned by the German RTL Group) is still independent when it comes to their reporting, plus there are weekly and one daily newspaper circulated countrywide which also heavily attack Orbán. They are likely to remain as they are, since the goal here definitely isn't about silencing opposing viewpoints, but to make sure that a significant part of the voting population only receives the message by the government, because its louder than anything else (for example, the majority of county-level newspapers are owned by one company, closely aligned with the govt). To illustrate my point, one of the govt-critical weeklies ran this cover a few years ago: http://magyarnemzetikormany.com/pi-klub/images/news/orbanhitlermagyarnarancs.jpg Try pulling this off in Turkey or Russia (or perhaps even in some more democratic countries), and you are in for a bad time. Here nothing came of it. Lesson for the day: just because your government allows itself to be directly attacked, doesn't mean things are ok when it comes to your media. Any sort of violent action against the govt is unnecessary given the situation, and would make matters way worse. In fact, calling it a dictatorship, when it isn't, is only making matters worse (and no, its neither fascist, nor communist). Hungary could be most aptly described as a "hybrid regime" or "illiberal democracy" (a term espoused by Orbán himself). Unlike in a dictatorship, elections exist, and not just for show. The stakes are just as major as in other countries, because (1) anyone is allowed to run (2) votes are not manipulated. Granted, elections are still not fair, because opposing parties have worse access to campaign resources in reality. I could talk about the topic of hybrid regimes in lengths (and its certainly something that should be talked about more often in the west), but to sum it up, its greatest advantage is its greatest disadvantage: the government can be changed purely by winning an election. That's all it takes. However in a hybrid regime to achieve this, you need an above average opposition party/leader(s)/candidate(s). The current Hungarian opposition is well below average, and in large part its their own fault. Not to mention the genuine and huge support behind Orbán (seriously look at this graph) There are numerous examples of long-standing hybrid regimes toppled purely through a simple election win (the 2000 Mexican election comes to my mind as an example, where Vicente Fox broke the 71 year rule of PRI). In time, the same will happen with Orbán or his party. In time.
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