Hungarian Conservative

This year, 250 photographers submitted 2,470 entries totalling 6,801 photos for the Hungarian Press Photo Contest. At the opening ceremony of the 42nd Hungarian Press Photo Exhibition on 11 April, awards were presented for the first three places in fourteen categories, along with numerous special awards.

In the latest revelation from the undercover footage shot of Action for Democracy operatives, a progressive activist shared how he would bombard heads of major news outlets and low-level journalists alike with requests to cover the Hungarian election according to their narrative. One of the journalists for the American news agency Associated Press has admitted to having received such requests through emails.

While the largest German paper Bild took a sympathetic tone toward refugees back in 2015, that has since changed. On 29 October, they published a 50-point anti-migration manifesto in which they proclaim, among other things, that ‘anyone who considers our constitution and our legal system a collection of non-binding recommendations should leave Germany as soon as possible,’ and ‘anyone who wants to live here permanently must learn German’.

‘All major US media outlets keeping quiet about the imprisonment of an American citizen for a political opinion—he was never even accused, let alone proven to be coordinating with the Russian state—is scary. How is it that not one journalist in American mainstream media is willing to write a single, factual, non-disparaging article about the plight of Mr Lira?’

Géza Szőcs, a Transylvanian Hungarian poet, writer, public intellectual and politician, who resisted the oppression of the Romanian communist dictatorship, was born exactly 70 years ago today.

The Hungarian American media mogul donated $1 million of his own wealth to Columbia University to establish a Journalism School exactly 120 years ago today. Pulitzer went through a lot to amass that wealth, having arrived in the United States as a foreign recruit for the Union Army in 1864, penniless and barely speaking a word of English.

Just a month after Project Veritas published their controversial investigation into Pfizer, founder and chairman James O’Keefe was ousted from the organisation by the board of directors. There are many theories online about why he was forced to leave. The official accusation by the board is that he mishandled funds.

The fact that it is government funding that keeps an opposition paper afloat flies in the face of the typical Western narrative that in Hungary, press freedom is suppressed through authoritarian methods.

Ralf Schuler, former chief political correspondent for Bild talked to Hungarian Conservative about why he left the paper, what he has been doing since, and how the future of journalism might look like.

This is no ‘journalism’—these are the tactics of the CIA and the KGB described in Cold War history books, played out in the 21st century in domestic contexts.