Four and a half years to the day after its launch, The Budapest Beacon is publishing its final article today – starts the interview. In it, Richard Field, BB’s managing director explains what is happening in Hungary.
Some of the most poignant statements from the interview with Richard Field:

Journalists of Magyar Nemzet are told that their paper shuts down immediately – 2 days after Orbán’s election victory
On the decline of media pluralism and shrinking pool of independent news sources:
“When we started we could typically draw on four or five different articles published by different media outlets on any given news story. The closure and/or purchase of a number of independent media outlets by pro-Fidesz businessmen makes it increasingly difficult for us to source accurate, reliable news about what is really happening in Hungary.”
“And the more the government spends “informing” the public about existential threats at home and abroad, the more taxpayer money can be diverted to pro-government media and advertising agencies. Over a period of three years they spent 100 billion forints, or $400 million, on a virtually continuous countrywide campaign conflating migration with terrorism.”
On why Fidesz won in the poorest regions:
“People threatened with starvation or exposure tend to be risk averse. Viktor Orban told them Islamic terrorists were going to steal their social benefits and rape their women. And they believed him.”
And why the European Union cannot act. Not just because of its consensus rule:
“My understanding is that western companies are making a lot of money in Hungary and are only too happy to run interference for Viktor Orbán with their governments. German companies in particular receive huge Hungarian state subsidies.”
“Corruption extending beyond Hungary’s borders might be a factor. Certain EU officials may also be in on it. Who knows? If someone is stealing billions of European taxpayer money each year, they can afford to share the love.”
Why is corruption (and public procurement and the distribution of EU funds) such a problem in Hungary?
“Because if you can steal $5 million a day filling in forms why would you do anything else? … Winning a national election in an EU fund net recipient country today is a license to steal money from European taxpayers.”
“Thousands of government employees do little more day in and day out than generate the reams of documents necessary to call down EU funds and disburse them to the companies owned by businessmen close to Fidesz officials or their relatives.”
On Orbán’s electoral victory:
“As for the electorate, you scare them by, for example, telling them that an old rich Jew is sending young Muslim men to rape your wives and daughters and strip you of your jobs and pensions. The European migration crisis came at the perfect time for Viktor Orbán and his merry band of kleptocrats.”
The shutdown came two days after the last broadsheet national daily, Magyar Nemzet was discontinued after Orbán’s landslide victory, alongside a radio station and a TV channel (HírTV) that is allowed to look for new investors – if they can and if the media council allows anyone but Fidesz oligarchs to buy it.
The Budapest Beacon started in 2013 and was one of the rare independent, English-speaking portals where you could get news about Hungary. I would contest Field’s opinion that “there is ample English language news about Hungary these days, from The New York Times to the BBC” though. They have become busy before the 2014 elections and published pretty much the same facts about Hungary, starting with a painfully long and tedious prologue about Orbán’s past in 1989. This tells you all you need to know about the degree of attention these outlets have for a tiny country such as Hungary. No one starts an article about the upcoming British elections with Theresa May’s youth and the country’s political history during the last 25 years to get readers up to speed. It is simply not the job on international media to follow parochial issues on a daily basis – yet, they also rely on local journalists when they need to report.
The end of media pluralism in Hungary will hit foreign correspondents, too, because they will find it more difficult to report about Hungary in the absence of independent local journalists. And the next time they will write about us? When arrests start or Orbán announces the state of emergency.
As Field put it:
“Hungary isn’t the only western country going over to the dark side. Our publisher loves Hungary and is genuinely concerned about democratic backsliding in this small central European country of 10 million. However, there’s a North American country of 320 million people he’s even more concerned about, if only because, for all of its problems, it remains a bastion of democracy for the time being.”
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Okay, but you ARE a tiny country. Germany has no independent English language news outlet!
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https://www.thelocal.de/
http://www.spiegel.de/international/
http://www.dw.com/en/top-stories/germany/s-1432
OK, DW is state-funded but it doesn’t just run CDU-propaganda and its journalists are not hiding their faces when they talk about the lies they knowingly spread.
https://meanwhileinbudapest.com/2018/04/09/public-broadcaster-ordered-to-call-munster-terrorist-a-migrant-on-election-day/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/13/hungary-journalists-state-tv-network-migrants-viktor-orban-government
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2018/02/arrested-banned-exiled-egypt-dissenting-voices-180224074458275.html (from approx. ’15:00)
I have spent years in global media monitoring and witnessed the disappearance of English versions of local news portals during the crisis. Papers needed to cut every fat, and serving curious foreigners was not a priority. Before 2008, hvg.hu had a frequently updated English version, for instance, that was cut out overnight and never returned. Index.hu recently promised to start an English version – they only translated 10 investigative articles. Not a news source. https://index.hu/english/
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Thank you! That is very interesting.
Spiegel is held 50% by “the staff” whatever that means and 50% by Angela Merkel’s close friend Liz Mohn (Mohn runs Bertelsmann who hold 100% of Grunder + Jahr which in turn holds the mentioned 50% of Spiegelgruppe). They report very much in her favor.
The Local is not critical of her, BUT I do appreciate them. They work cleaner than any other German news outlet that I know. They waste a lot of space on irrelevancy like ‘what is the best ice cream in Germany?’ It isn’t exactly a publication with reach, either.
DW only runs CDU propaganda! Come on!
I just ran to today’s DW reporting to find an example of lying.
http://www.dw.com/en/palestinians-gather-for-mass-protests-along-gaza-israel-border/a-43371240
This one shows pictures of burning tires, but they call it in the text ‘protest’.
This is better:
http://www.dw.com/en/at-germanys-echo-music-awards-its-record-sales-and-not-artistic-merit-that-count/a-43379418
A thug and a left-wing extremist band won a prize and now the explanation is that the jury only cared for the monetary profits. As if
kids cared about German award show ‘echo’. Silly.
Harmless stuff, but I just had a quick look.
In any event, there is no German big news outlet that speaks about the corruption that happens in the German government. These dudes also get miraculously rich. Spiegel ones reported that Merkel’s tiny constituency received 20% of the national broadband investments.
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/alexander-dobrindt-verteilt-seine-internet-millionen-a-1089801.html
The story was never followed up outside some tech blogs. It’s silly.
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Wow, thank you! I didn’t know that.
This explains why German companies are so cozy with the Hun government. Siemens only got away without consequences for bribing locals in Hungary. Now they are building nuclear turbines in Hungary – despite Energiewende – just because they got a cut of the disastrously Paks2 nuclear power station that is built on Russian loans and for no visible reason apart from Russian ambitions.
I miss daily news in English from Central European countries especially. So much stupid is going down everywhere – and people only really understand how stupid they are when they see others doing it as well.
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Until 2002 bribery (abroad) was even tax deductible in Germany.
Do you know English news sources for the Catalan situation or about Poland?
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