#mediacouncil

Earlier this week, acting on a complaint filed by a civic organization called the Otherness Foundation (or Másság Alapítvány), the Media Council of Hungary fined Magyar Hirlap, the daily newspaper that published a highly controversial opinion piece about Roma written by the journalist Zsolt Bayer.

Back in January, reacting to a story about a lethal stabbing that occurred in Hungary, Bayer authored an opinion piece about certain members of the Roma community, calling this certain group "animals" and "unfit for coexistence." Today, Bayer is an independent journalist, but he is also one of the very early members of the ruling party, Fidesz. Despite the fact that he does not hold any position in the party or government, many commentators at the time made much of his relationship to Fidesz and his friendship with Prime Minister Orbán. (For further details, here is a fair summary of the incident in English.)

Deputy Prime Minister, Tibor Navracsics, representing the government and party co-founder, Tamás Deutsch, representing Fidesz, were quick to condemn Bayer's article. Later, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán revealed in an interview (in German) that he personally spoke with Bayer at the time about the opinion piece, which resulted in Bayer trying to back away from the article in a subsequent column.

The National Media and Infocommunications Authority

In response to the claim by the civic organization, the Media Authority investigated the issue and found that the Bayer article violated article 17 of the Act CIV of 2010 on the Freedom of the Press and the Fundamental Rules of Media Content, which says that "media content may not incite hatred against any nation, community, national, ethnic, linguistic or other minority or majority as well as any church or religious group." The result: the newspaper was fined 250,000 forint (about 1,100 US dollars). The newspaper can appeal the decision in court.

Two years ago, when Hungarian media regulation reforms were especially in the spotlight, many critics argued that the Media Council will abuse content rules to punish opposition media and create a chilling effect in the media. Fact is, this is the first time under the new law that the Media Council has ever fined any printed media for violation of content rules and this was in response to a claim made by a civic organization. The Media Council, as we see, intervenes only rarely, in extraordinary situations and, in this case, found against a newspaper typically regarded as pro-government for the writing of an independent journalist associated, as critics were fond of pointing out at the time, with the ruling party.

"Everybody is a pirate."