At the heart of the Fidesz party’s ability to stay in power is to detect the vulnerabilities of people and organizations, and then exacerbate these, making Hungarians beholden to the regime. The chaos surrounding a major Hungarian news site called VS.hu and large state subsidies that traveled to the site’s publisher in a secretive and a roundabout way, is indicative of how the Orbán regime uses a type of “soft power” (as opposed to open terror) to destroy independent media in Hungary and bolster his increasingly authoritarian state.
The VS.hu opinion news site was one broadly perceived as being fairly balanced in its reporting, and was open to opposition viewpoints. Over the past several days, however, we learned that the publication belongs to a company called New Wave Kft., which is co-owned by the cousin of Fidesz politician and Hungarian Central Bank president, György Matolcsy.
VS.hu logo.
VS.hu received over 500 million forints (approx. $1.3 million) in public funding from a foundation affiliated with the Hungarian Central Bank. Public funds traveled from the national bank led by Mr. Matolcsy to a company (New Wave Kft.) affiliated with his cousin, Tamás Szemerey. The monies that travelled to VS.hu represent a drop in the bucket, in terms of the tens of millions of dollars that the Hungarian Central Bank appears to have transferred to people and companies with either family ties to the bank’s president, or to the Fidesz party. New Wave Kft, which publishes Origo, in addition to VS.hu, received some $2.3 million from the Central Bank, while a range of right-wing and extremist authors and publications also received subsidies from the Central Bank. For instance, a show broadcast on Echo TV, owned by Fidesz oligarch Gábor Széles, received $30,000 in funding, while a publicist with Mr. Széles’s Magyar Hírlap daily obtained about $11,000, to explore the impact of multinational companies in Hungary. A wide range of other companies and individuals on the right received funding through the Hungarian Central Bank, in order to produce “analyses,” which arguably amounted to little more than thinly veiled government propaganda.
This is where VS.hu comes into the picture. It appears as though the publication received significant funds to publish material friendly to the government, or perhaps promotional information, yet at no point were journalists at the news site or the broader readership made aware of articles or essays that may have been “sponsored” in this way. The publication’s editor-in-chief, Olivér Lebhardt, resigned on Monday and noted:
“I made a mistake when I allowed for sponsored content to appear in our publication, without indicating who the sponsors happened to be. Of course, I wouldn’t have had much of a say in the matter, but this practice should have been reason enough for me to resign right there and then.”
Olivér Lebhardt.
As of Monday afternoon, 12 journalists affiliated with VS.hu submitted their resignations. VS.hu employee Sándor Joób, for instance, announced his resignation on Facebook and added that he would hand over his last pay cheque from VS.hu to a charity. Mr. Joób noted that this gesture aimed to help “restore the integrity of the journalistic profession.”
Mr. Joób’s principled stance is truly commendable. And the same could be said for the dozen or so journalists who have walked away from a steady job and existence, because they did not want to be associated with a publication that was the beneficiary of systematic corruption.
If more Hungarian journalists, civil servants, business people, academics and others took inspiration from the journalists and editors of VS.hu, it would be much harder for any authoritarian regime to grow deep roots.
