The wonderful thing about being a liberal journalist is that facts don’t matter. When someone does not give the answer you want during an interview, you can just pretend they did.
Such is the case for left-lib Italian outlet La Repubblica, which saw fit last week to just make up a quote by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán whole cloth.
Speaking to the leader outside the Vatican regarding US sanctions on Russian oil companies, journalist Tommaso Ciriaco claims Orbán decried the move by President Donald Trump as being a ‘mistake’.
‘So, did Trump go too far and make a mistake?’ the La Repubblica interviewer present allegedly asked.
‘From the Hungarian point of view, yes. And so we will try to find a way out, especially for Hungary,’ Orbán—supposedly—responded.
‘I’m going to him to get him to lift the sanctions,’ Orbán—allegedly—continued.
It’s one hell of a scoop. Orbán turning on Trump over sanctions against Russia? And doing so so blatantly? Maybe the Hungarian PM truly is pro-Russia after all!
Oh wait. Turns out the entire conversation was made up.
Leftist media outlets lie. They lie all the time. The problem for our friend Tommaso here is that the La Repubblica meeting—which was conducted in English—was recorded on video and later uploaded online by Hungarian parliamentarian Balázs Orbán.
In the footage, Orbán actually rejects the ‘mistake’ wording for the current sanction situation, instead saying that he now just wants to figure out how to make Trump’s new ‘system bearable for the Hungarian economy.’
‘In the footage, Orbán actually rejects the “mistake” wording for the current sanction situation’
He is then pressed again on whether the move by Washington goes ‘too far’, with the journalist dropping all reference to the idea of it being a ‘mistake’, contrary to the La Repubblica report. Again, Orbán denies this, only saying that special allowances will need to be figured out for Hungarian taxpayers, who remain reliant on Russian hydrocarbons for complex geographic reasons.
‘We try to find a way—a special kind of treatment—for Hungary.’
Contrary to what our friend Tommaso reports, Orbán saying that a special exception needs to be made for Hungary implies that he has no major issue with the core of the sanctions. He most certainly is not calling them a ‘mistake’. He never even used the word once.
So why lie? Well, our Italian friend’s social media accounts indicate a wonderful love of Europe and European integration. In one X post, the journalist heralds recent supposed electoral failures of the ‘far-right’, saying that a new ‘pro-European majority’ has been born in the last 20 months.
He is also a hardcore supporter of the Ukrainian war effort, as well as a major critic of Donald Trump.
I wonder if that’s at all related to his decision to make up an Orbán quote. Perhaps we’ll never know…
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