András Szalay-Berzeviczy - who is the head of TranzPress Kft., which deals with international media monitoring and analysis - told us what Hungary's media image is like in his experience, and why it is the way it is.

Since 1956, Hungary's media presence has not been as strong as in the last twelve years. The main reason for this is that the pro-sovereignty Hungarian government, which envisages the future of Europe within a national framework, finds itself at odds with the mainstream media and political arena in many cases.

The mainstream press opens fire on the Hungarian prime minister on a series of questions, and then quietly self-corrects over time.

A classic example of this is the 2020 article by the liberal Die Presse Viktor Orbán hat recht gehabt – und eine Entschuldigung verdient (Viktor Orbán was right – and deserves an apology). The strong headwind lasted for years, but now the southern border closure has become accepted not only in the conservative Western press, but also in some liberal media. The domestic government gives specific answers to major social issues, and the international media usually punishes them disproportionately, with exaggerations and superficial stereotypes.

Our media image is not only about us, but also about the internal political struggles of foreign countries. A good part of the American conservative press, for example, today writes such laudations about Hungary that it is not difficult to notice: they are using us in their – often seemingly hopeless – struggle with the Democrats. For them, an example to follow is how a conservative, right-wing government stays on its feet for cycles against the headwinds of a strongly left-wing political and media space.

90 percent of international news is produced by four major news agencies: Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters and Bloomberg. According to international media researchers, these news agencies are centrist, or rather to the left of the center.

There is a kind of monopoly in the opinion market, and what is politically newsworthy in the world is decided by the big newswire editorial offices.

In the so-called swarm journalism trend, journalists take the news from the agencies without question, often without wanting to know the position of the other side, in this case the Hungarian side. Meanwhile, there is no news agency to the right of center in the Western world. And the situation increases if we take into account the indicators of the world's news consumption. The three largest news search sites, MSN News, Yahoo News, and Google News each reach one billion daily visitors and search mainly for the news content of major news agencies. As a result, AP's writings reach one billion people a day. Compared to this huge audience, a right-wing paper with a reach of a few thousand people is a drop in the ocean.

Forty years of socialism and a misguided media market system change are the reasons why the issue of media sovereignty and the national strategic importance of the media have only recently been put on our agenda. This is not an issue in the West. In most of Europe, the majority of the media market is in domestic hands, and even the Western European press market is owned by two-hundred-year-old family businesses

After the regime change, in the current of spontaneous privatization, Hungary was the first in the former Eastern bloc to sell out the press market. French Robert Hersant bought Magyar Nemzet, British Robert Maxwell bought Magyar Hírlap and Esti Hírlap, Grüner + Jahr bought Népszabadság, Ringier bought Nemzeti Sport, Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung HVG, and Axel Springer rural papers. We could go on and on about the ways in which foreign media conglomerates have broken up the domestic press market. They didn't care either: they were here to maximize profits, not to flourish the media culture or journalism education in Hungary. This is how we arrive at the 2007 statement of Pál Eötvös - former Népszabadság leader and MÚOSZ president - who can hardly be accused of right-wing: "The fact that the Ringier publisher owns seventy percent of all nationally distributed daily newspapers can only happen in Hungary and banana republics."

All legislators are fighting for media sovereignty, from Europe to the Arab region to Australia. It is a basic principle that there is no democracy without the press. The press not only has the power to shape public opinion, but also to make policy. I have been to many places in the world, but nowhere have I seen that a country renounced the importance of the media for national strategy and sovereignty.

Source: Mandarin

Featured image: Árpád Földházi