Budapest backwash

By A.L.B. | BUDAPEST

THE NEWS was not a surprise and nor did it show much Christmas spirit. But it still came as a shock: Klubrádió, the enormously popular liberal talk radio station, has lost its frequency and will have to close by March 2012. The Media Council, all of whose members were nominated by the ruling right-wing Fidesz party after opposition parties boycotted it, and whose chairwoman, Annamária Szalai is a former Fidesz MP, has awarded the frequency to Autórádió, an obscure new company.

András Arató, Klubrádió's managing director, said he will contest the decision in court, as the station has a moral obligation to its half million listeners and 10,000 financial supporters. Karola Kiricsi, the council's spokeswoman, refused to explain to journalists the precise criteria under which the decision was taken and reportedly left the press conference after answering three questions. The Council maintains that it is an autonomous body, independent of government, and has assigned the state-owned frequencies in accordance to legal procedures.

Either way, the decision will fuel the growing international alarm about the government's relentless centralisation of power, its packing of formerly independent institutions with party allies and will boost rising domestic anger over media freedom. Thousands of protestors gathered outside Hungarian Radio headquarters on Thursday afternoon. Meanwhile, a group of current and former state television editors are on hunger strike after Zoltán Lomnici, a former chief justice, was airbrushed out of footage shown on state television. The clumsy editing brought back memories, all too familiar to this part of the world, of Soviet manipulation of photographs and history.

One editor has since been sacked and another reassigned, but the hunger strike continues. The strikers say that the airbrush episode is symptomatic of widespread news manipulation and political pressure from the government. Norbert Fekete, a former editor at the evening news programme told Reuters: “We'd get clear instructions about expectations of any given story, what it must suggest. A recurring theme was the pressure to cast a negative light on previous Socialist governments. In this regime only good things happen.”

Both the government and the content provider for state news channels strongly deny the claims. The government fully respects the independence of the public media and rejects all allegations of influence, said a spokesman. But not everything is going the government's way. To the surprise of many, the Constitutional Court threw out several key provisions of the Media Law and drastically curbed the powers of the Media Council, removing its power to scrutinise print and online content for contravening human rights, human dignity and privacy. The law, the court ruled, “unconstitutionally limited freedom of the written press”. The court also strengthened journalists' protection of sources, saying they may only be forced to divulge them under strict legal procedures.

The Court also threw out a new law that regulates religious organisations and vetoed provisions of the criminal code that would the allow the chief prosecutor to decide which court would hear a particular trial, allow preliminary detention for five days without charges and allow a suspect to be held for two days without the right to contact a lawyer. Government officials said they will work with the court to find constitutional solutions to the problems. Meanwhile, MPs from LMP, the green-liberal opposition party, newly boosted by flattering coverage in the New York Times have chained themselves to the gates of Parliament to protest about the parlous state of Hungarian democracy. It may be down, but it's not certainly not out.

(Picture credit: AFP)