He writes about restrictions on journalistic freedom, news rewritten, approved at a “higher level” and topics to avoid, based on internal letters from Free Europe, current employees speaking anonymously and reports from a former correspondent.

The newspaper is afraid of their work and therefore asks that their names be withheld. MTIHe writes about journalists and János Kárpáti, a former Brussels correspondent who was fired in 2015, about trials that may have taken place at the state news agency in the last decade, since the Fidesz government came to power.

According to the speakers, Free Europe recalled that the reduction of the staff of the Hungarian Telegraph Office had already started before 2010, and that after the change of government it accelerated and was accompanied by greater centralization and the “reduction” of materials from news agencies. According to one source, experts in certain fields, who had exclusive information and a deeper knowledge on their own topic, were slowly withdrawn from them, MTI interviews with politicians have been almost non-existent for some time, and important events often They are no longer informed, they only receive communications from politicians or companies.

In the case of important political decisions, according to the anonymous statement, now only what the government says about it is demolished. “We don’t establish a background behind what the decision is really about, what changes, why it could be wrong.”

According to another Free Europe source, “censorship was gradually introduced between 2011 and 2012”, one of the first indications, according to their recollections, was that they were ordered to look carefully at the writings of foreign newspapers about Hungary.

János Kárpáti, who worked at the MTI between 1981 and 2015, told the newspaper that he does not remember that a topic has been banned. However, he was able to cite a case in which he was “exposed to the public media as a whole” that someone who was a strong critic of the Hungarian government had to be questioned. The journalist, who became a correspondent for a news agency in Brussels in 2007, asked Prime Minister Viktor Orbán a non-negotiated question in 2015 at an event there. He was later repatriated and fired, although he said he was never told that the issues had to be agreed beforehand.

According to sources who asked that their names be withheld, the process for publishing materials has also changed since 2010, with a radical reduction in the number of staff entitled to publish and an increase in the list of “negotiable” topics. However, according to the speakers, it is not those who work in this position who have the last word on a substance, but they are also mentioned “somewhere” where they are at a very high level of government. Therefore, submitted articles seem to appear only for a long time, either rewritten, abbreviated, or with inserts that were not described by the original authors.

According to the speakers, Free Europe also writes that Hungarian national political material, foreign news related to Hungary, news about the United States, migration, Brussels, Russia, the epidemic and the church, among others, are subject to coordination. The newspaper said, citing internal letters, that the MTI does not publish the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International materials.

Main Image: The MTI logo in front of the headquarters and production base of the Media Services Support and Asset Management Fund (MTVA) in Kunigunda Street, Óbuda


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MTI did not issue a statement in which DK wrote about the victory over MTI



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The party’s state censorship is even silent on the fact that DK won a lawsuit against censorship, the Democratic Coalition wrote in a statement.

So far, MTI has not written a single line about firing the indexers or the demonstration



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The public telegraph office is listening.