For over a decade, Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán has been waging a war against the country’s free press and he is succeeding. Most of Hungary’s 10-million people do not speak another language.
Orbán’s fake-news factories, trolls and misleading “political analysts” dominate the media and the result is that today the Hungarian public seems to be one of the most misinformed and misled in Europe.
When Századvég, a pro-government think tank, recently asked who is responsible for the „deterioration of the conflict” between Ukraine and Russia, 47% claimed that BOTH Putin and Zelensky are responsible. 13% of the responses put the blame exclusively on Zelensky for the Russian attack against Ukraine, his own country. Overall 60% percent of Hungarians think that Ukraine’s President is to be blamed for Putin’s aggression.
Fully 66% of Hungarians are satisfied with Viktor Orbán’s friendship with Russian President Putin and think that it is advantageous to the country. This survey was taken AFTER Putin’s attack and Ukraine is Hungary’s neighbor. In 1956 Russian tanks rolled into Budapest to defeat the Hungarian Revolution. It seems that the Hungarian public has a short memory.
Not surprisingly 91% of Hungarians oppose sanctions against Putin’s Russia.
Hungarian media gives a distorted view of the world. In Budapest most people have access to differing views and foreign media, but the countryside is Orbán’s base and it is kept in the dark. They hear that the West is collapsing, children are indoctrinated with LBTQ propaganda, and millions have sex-change operations. The taxpayer-funded gibberish propaganda was described by an employee of network MTVA as “migration, migration, Soros, Soros, a new baby panda was born at the zoo.”
The European Federation of Journalists’ 2019 report noted: “Since 2010, the Hungarian government has systematically dismantled media independence, freedom and pluralism, distorted the media market and divided the journalistic community in the country, achieving a degree of media control unprecedented in an EU member state.”
George Lazar
