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    Magyar Tells Hungary State Media Its News Coverage to Go Off Air
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    Magyar Tells Hungary State Media Its News Coverage to Go Off Air

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    1. bloomberg on

      *From Bloomberg News reporter Zoltan Simon:*

      Incoming Hungarian leader Peter Magyar told Hungarian public radio he’ll take state media’s news coverage off the air as soon as he forms a government, saying the outlets had spread fear and lies to try to keep outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orban in power.

      The prime minister elect spoke in a tense public media interview on Wednesday — his first in more than a year-and-a-half after having been effectively shut out of the state outlets that Orban had turned into a government mouthpiece since 2010.

      Magyar compared the channel’s coverage to propaganda in North Korea and Nazi-era Germany, saying that media journalists had been complicit in what he described as a system based of cronyism and impunity. The state media reporter regularly interrupted Magyar, in stark contrast to less combative interviews with Orban.

    2. szopatoszamuraj on

      The radio interview was bizarre, and frankly the televised interview of his isnt much better. The propagandists are clearly hating his ass, and they aren’t even trying to hide it with their confrontativeness. My favorite part so far was when Magyar mentioned some of their lies, like germans not having sex anymore, because yes, that was said multiple times in the last few years.

    5. LittleSchwein1234 on

      The Hungarian public broadcaster was not independent, but stuffed with Orbán’a sockpuppets.

      Getting rid of it until it can become an independent agency is a necessary step, even if harsh. It’s better not to have a public broadcaster than one being openly political in one party’s favour.

    6. Shikazuru on

      From Polish perspective (we went through this after our last election but in a “less elegant” way due to President Duda veto power & some long term position in TV Broadcast National Office being PiS pawns.) such sudden cut off from propaganda stream caused sudden movement from national TV news to some private right-wing aligned media that immediatly hired top propagandist (TV Republika, wPolsce24).

      Their viewership skyrocketed as lots of people prefer to be feed by propaganda than ingest “new truth”. Also after the change a lot of people (on both sides) were questioning the quality of the news under new management.