Hungary’s new government has halted public media news broadcasts to dismantle the propaganda machine

As a result of ongoing media reforms, the frequencies of Kossuth Rádió, the most listened-to public radio station in Hungary, will be broadcast for the next few weeks alongside the offerings of Radio Bartók, which specializes in classical music, until its own new program starts in mid-August, writes German wave.

The radio channel is cleansed as if symbolically with culture, by the country’s most famous and significant composers, Bartókin, Kodályn, Eötvösin and Kurtágin with music.

The repertoire of classical and contemporary music thus reaches around one million new listeners for more than a month.

Television channels once used in the Soviet Union Pyotr Tchaikovsky Swan pond as a tool of censorship. The ballet was shown to the people by, among others, the head of state Leonid Brezhnev after he died in 1982 and when the junta representing the old communists tried to seize power from the party leader in the 1990s Mikhail Gorbashovilta.

Unlike in the Soviet Union, in Hungary the works of well-known composers are played to the people as a sign of freedom from censorship and propaganda.

Classic playing the music is related to the restructuring of the country’s public broadcasting company announced by the new Hungarian government on Tuesday last week, which will dismantle the former prime minister’s Viktor Orbánin the remnants of the propaganda machinery of the imperial period.

BBC:n and of The Guardian according to Hungary’s main public television channel M1 stopped news broadcasts for the time being, and the state-run radio station has been suspended completely.

Last week, the news channel M1 showed only a black screen with the text:

“Public media should not lie. We are sorry that we have done so for so long. Public media is now being reformed to become independent and reliable. Our news service is currently suspended. Stay tuned!”

Only the website of the news agency MTI, which is also part of the public media holding company MTVA, continued to publish political news.

Viktor Orbánin the leader of the opposition party Tisza, who ousted in the parliamentary elections in the spring Péter Hungarian declared the day historic.

“Today is the end of propaganda information on public media channels. They lied day and night, they lied on all frequencies. It’s over now,” Magyar commented.

Last Tuesday’s suspension of broadcasting came shortly after the Magyar government replaced the management of state television and radio.

Magyar’s Tisza party won a landslide victory in the April elections and won a two-thirds majority in parliament after promising “system change” and a complete break with the Orbán era.

After the election, Magyar announced that he wanted to create a “genuinely balanced and objective news service”. As one of his first acts as prime minister, he ordered a “comprehensive and immediate” inquiry into public service media and its funding.