The CEO of the company that publishes the newspaper Mandiner has been dismissed on instructions by the finance minister, Prime Minister Péter Magyar said on Facebook on Friday.
“Starting from today, all funding for this lying propaganda newspaper will be stopped,” Magyar added. Finance Minister András Kármán said on Facebook after Magyar’s post that “we are not spending the Hungarian people’s money on propaganda.”
“There is a place and a reason for the existence of quality journalism, but there is none for propaganda financed by public money,” he added.
Karman also said that the government had completely overhauled the public media, whose role is to provide credible and informative coverage — even if this contains information that is inconvenient for the government of the day –, rather than to serve the needs of the current political leadership.
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The period since the change of government had shown that certain market players had been able to operate solely because the then ruling party, in a sophisticated manner, rewarded them from public funds for spreading the messages that suited them, the minister said.
In the space of half a year last year, Mandiner secured nearly 400 million forints (EUR 1.1m) in state advertising, which, projected over a full year, amounts to nearly 800 million forints, Karman said. They received a further 1.1 billion forints in funding from the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) Foundation, “but even with all this free money, they still managed to run up a deficit of 1.1 billion forints last year,” he added.
“We are channelling the public funds saved on propaganda into serving the Hungarian people and the economy,” he said. “This will result in a VAT reduction, back-to-school grants, increased pensions and, ultimately, a functioning and humane Hungary.”
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The problem with the media is lack of accountability.
Reporters and journalists have turned into political activists and campaigners. They do not see their duty as presenting information consisting of the W-questions in the quality and quantity that is in genuine public interest; they see themselves as opinion-formers, persuaders, culture-shapers. Most of them are, let’s be honest, at the very least Left-leaning.
If the government does not have its own “propaganda” outlet, it is at the mercy of the “independent” media, which may well be majority-hostile to the government.
If the government is not allowed to have its own media outlet(s), then there has to be a body that monitors media output and strips press credentials and broadcasting licenses from those that fail to conform to the criteria I touched upon in para. 2 above.