Hungary’s largest state TV channel went dark on Tuesday and apologised to viewers for its lies.
On a black screen the message read: «Public media should not lie. We apologise for having done so for so long», writes Journalisten.no.
This is what Hungarian TV screens looked like on Tuesday.
The state media are now to be restructured to become independent and credible, and news broadcasts are temporarily suspended, reports the news agency AFP. This is an important flagship issue for the new Prime Minister Péter Magyar, who took over in April.
Magyar and his party Tisza said immediately after the election victory that they would stop the news broadcasts of the state media until objectivity can be ensured as part of more comprehensive measures to restore press freedom in the country. He wants to erase all traces of the previous Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Magyar celebrated the decision in a post on Facebook, writes The Guardian.
«A historic day. Today the propaganda broadcasts on the public media platforms are over. They lied at night, they lied during the day, they lied on all wavelengths. Now it is over.»
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) claimed before the election in the spring that around 80 per cent of Hungarian media were controlled by oligarchs with ties to the previous government coalition. Magyar promised in the election campaign a comprehensive media reform, with a new media law, a new media supervisory authority and strengthened press freedom.
The shutdown includes both the TV channel M1 and the radio channel Kossuth. Broadcasts are expected to resume later on Wednesday, but without news programmes, which are to be rebuilt gradually with a new editorial staff. State-controlled editorial offices are to ensure press freedom, in other words.
All of Brussels celebrated Magyar’s victory after the election in the spring. However, there are signs that the EU celebrated too early, but in any case a certain tension can be detected in Budapest.
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Newspapers are also under attack from Magyar, and MTVA, a separate capital management and financing fund tasked with supporting the organisational transformation of public media services, says journalists are threatened with mass redundancies, according to the conservative newspaper Magyar Nemzet.
According to our information the suspended employees include Katalin Nagy, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Vasárnapi, and the news anchors Csaba Radnai, Balázs Imre and Boglárka Meszes. According to our sources, however, several affected employees have already been notified that they may be called back to work within a few days, while it is still unknown whether the extraordinary measures are a preparation for mass redundancies.
The total number of suspended managers in the media appears to be between 23 and 25. The Hungarian newspaper has contacted several trade union leaders and labour law experts, who told it that mass suspensions without justification were unusual.
If a company plans to do something like this, there are strict rules, so that the details around group redundancies must be reported to the relevant authority, the affected employees themselves must be informed about what awaits them, and they are also obliged to coordinate with the trade unions affiliated with the company.
This is reported not to have happened in the mentioned examples. Not even the trade unions are said to have been notified.
This appears to be Prime Minister Magyar’s method of recreating press freedom in Hungary. Magyar Nemzet describes the development as a «total dictatorship in public media».