Published: 22 June 2012
Region: Hungary & Worldwide
By Aidan White
The failure of the Hungarian Media Authority to investigate complaints over alleged racism in a controversial television documentary about the Roma community is the latest sign of decline of a regulator which was created by the right-wing FIDEZ government to control the media but which has become a national embarrassment.
In Hungary racism and extremist opinion on ethnic issues is increasingly part of the mainstream political discourse and the documentary Gypsy/Hungarian Coexistence, broadcast in March by Magyar Television, the state broadcaster, raised protests both inside and outside the country.
The programme’s troubling portrayal of the Roma community angered civil liberty campaigners and Roma alike leading to a formal complaint over hate-speech which the authority has decided to ignore.
That decision caused fresh outrage and astonished many observers, not leastbecause one of the key arguments deployed by the supporters of the authority and a new media law when it was passed 18 months ago was the need for tough regulation to counter intolerance and incitement to racial hatred in media.
In fact, far from protecting vulnerable and marginalised communities, the authority and media law have become increasingly irrelevant in dealing with media and the rise of racism.
From the outset the government’s politically-driven policy which created a media authority packed with people from the ruling party met stiff resistance. The European Union was the first to act in January 2011. Member states, embarrassed to find the EU presidency in the hands of a country that was stirring up a human rights storm, called on the Budapest government to change the law.
The authority’s power to levy massive fines, withdraw publishing licences and enforce its own definitions of what constitutes biased journalism across all media platforms, including the Internet, was incompatible with European standards, they said.
After a hurried review involving officials from the European Commission and the Hungarian government some changes were made, although for many they were largely cosmetic and certainly did not go as far as the minimum demands made by the Council of Europe’s human rights chief Thomas Hammarberg.
In the face of continued opposition at home and abroad, the media authority tried further to defuse opposition by signing agreements with a number of media associations in broadcasting and the press to create a form of co-regulation whereby the media themselves would impose a code of conduct and deal with complaints from the public.
But this solution was derided by international free speech and human rights campaigners who visited the country in November 2011. They said this enforced self-regulation was “outsourcing censorship with the co-operation of national and international media owners alike.”
Meanwhile, the media law was about to hit the buffers at home. In December 2011 the Hungarian Constitutional Court announced radical changes to two of the most problematic parts of the law cancelling the vague content restrictions on printed and online written press and strengthening the right of journalists to protect their sources of information.
For good measure the court cancelled the post of Media Commissioner created under the law with the right to investigate without any reason and report to the media authority saying it was unconstitutional.
These changes finally came into force at the beginning of June 2012. Even so they may not be enough to satisfy European critics. Thorbjorn Jagland, the leader of the Council of Europe, on May 15 said more work needs to be done.
Although the media authority is increasingly an empty shell, it is not quite irrelevant. It continues to function as a party political instrument with its hands on the controls of major state media including the public broadcast networks and the Hungarian news agency MTI.
“Public service broadcasting is increasingly full of propaganda,” says Sandor Orban, of the Budapest-based press freedom network SEENPM, “but the biggest threat to professional news gathering is the material from the MTI which is circulated free of charge but which is manipulated, particularly to eliminate any information about international criticism of Hungary.”
Cash-strapped media outlets across the country willingly run the agency stories without verifying the information creating a distorted reality, particularly of international news and opinion says Orban. “This has a bigger impact on news than the media law,” he says.
In addition, the government interferes in the media market by ensuring that state advertising, which is a lucrative source of income, goes only to its political friends in media.
As the Hungarian crisis intensifies, the absence of a credible media policy to nurture honest journalism becomes more evident and the impact on Hungary’s most vulnerable communities more far-reaching.
The decision not to investigate the disturbing television documentary on Roma is a profound failure of principle that confirms the wretched state of the media authority, but it should also mark a turning point. It underscores an urgent need to replace the current media law and to move swiftly towards non-political regulation of journalism.
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Below you can see excerpt from controversial television documentary about the Roma community in Hungary:
