Hungary and the Western media

25 April, Easter Monday

One of the puzzles of the moment is why virtually everything that the centre-right Hungarian government (currently in power) is doing receives an almost uniformly bad press in the Western media. If one thinks about this, it is inconceivable that any institution should be so overwhelmingly negative, have no redeeming features at all. Nothing in the world is a 100 percent good or a 100 percent bad, unless we want to present it that way. The question, then, is why so many communicators have closed their ears to this argument and continue to paint the Fidesz government as the very  embodiment of bad governance.

There is, in reality, a complex of interlocking explanations and that complexity is generally disdained by journalists. This is not surprising, given that the ordering principle of the media is “simplify and then exaggerate”.

Then, there is the discursive contest for power, the heart of democratic action, where (in an ideal world) different arguments clash. The problem faced by Hungary, and for that matter other Central European states, is what might termed their discursive handicap. Only Hungarians know Hungarian (with very few exceptions), which means that the Hungarian voice, the Hungarian argument has to be translated into a language that the media can understand. This necessarily simplifies and thereby distorts the Hungarian (Polish, Czech, Lithuanian etc.) version, above all by largely eliminating the local context and nuance.

Third is the question of who does the translating, the transfer of ideas and information. The proposition that this is or can be in any way neutral is nonsense. Every translation is freighted with baggage of one kind or another. Particularly difficult is distortion with a political agenda that the journalist does not comprehend, indeed cannot because she has limited knowledge of the local context.

The problem is made more acute by the western journalists who mostly seek out interlocutors who speak their kind of language, share their assumptions and, horribile dictu, their prejudices. In the current context, this means generally the unrepresentative views of the Hungarian left. The journalists then hear what they want to hear from their Central European sources and, instead of questioning their sources for bias, accept what the sources say as The Truth. Here the distinction between presenting the truth and presenting reality becomes glaring – if we present an opinion without its context, what we are doing may be reflecting the truth, but not reality.

Reality disappears and the reader is left with a partial, if not indeed very partial picture of reality, one that she can and will assume is authentic. Few will interrogate texts, no one has the time for that. And once something is in the public sphere, it stays there, poisoning the atmosphere and generating resentment among those feel that their views have traduced.

And when one or other Western paper takes this further and describes Hungarians in near-racist terms – the cartoon from the Süddeutsche Zeitung reproduced in this blog (19 April) is a striking illustration – then no one should be surprised if the anti-Western resentment is intensified.

The irony is that it is the Hungarian left that suffers. Majority opinion in Hungary understands the intermediation role played by the left, regards it as contributing to the poor image that Hungary has and blames the left. The result is that its support remains low and the left is widely seen as acting against the national interest.

Sch. Gy