In a Facebook post, General Director of the Hungarian State Opera House Szilveszter Ókovács questioned the impartiality of Hungary’s public media. He claimed that his views received far less coverage in a report about the Opera House than the criticisms levelled against him. Prime Minister Péter Magyar of Hungary responded in a comment, reproaching Ókovács for not objecting to the public media’s operations under the previous administration, Origo.hu reports.
Ókovács began his post by declaring, ‘Impartial public media? I don’t think so.’
According to Director Ókovács, only a few seconds of his interview—requested at short notice for Sunday’s broadcast—aired. At the same time, the criticism directed at the Opera House was given significantly more airtime. Ókovács claimed that his position accounted for only about 19 per cent of the report, while the opposing side’s position accounted for the remaining 81 per cent.
The Director specifically objected the report’s failure, in his view, to include several pieces of information that could have provided context for the ongoing debate.
Ókovács also claimed the public television report began with the opening sentence of an article published earlier by the pro-Tisza Hungarian news site Telex; and the report did not even note the website as a source.
‘How can this be considered real news?’ the director asked. He also announced that he will not give any more statements to the Hungarian public media from now on.
PM Péter Magyar soon took to the comment section of Ókovács’s comment section to react.
‘It’s funny that for years it didn’t bother him that no one outside the government was allowed to speak there,’ the Prime Minister wrote, using the informal conjugation to address someone in Hungarian.
PM Magyar then referred to his own past experiences. He claimed that, as an opposition leader, he was never given even a single second to speak, while a person he described as Ókovács’s ‘dear family member’, who has since become a Member of Parliament, was regularly allowed to make disparaging statements about him, Magyar said.
‘Back then, you didn’t say anything about percentages [of positive or negative coverage in public media],’ the Prime Minister fired back.
Earlier this month, Magyar already came under criticism for his handling of public media.
During a joint press conference with Prime Ministers Andrej Babiš of Czechia and Robert Fico of Slovakia in Bratislava, Slovakia, Babiš praised Magyar’s predecessor, Viktor Orbán, for erecting the fence along Hungary’s southern border, thus protecting Europe from mass illegal migration. Magyar then signalled with a hand gesture to reporters present—presumably to the staff of the Hungarian state news agency MTI—to omit this part of the press conference from their reports.
MTI ultimately did leave Babiš’s praise of PM Orbán out of its coverage.
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