On Thursday, a spokeswoman for Joe Biden’s campaign denounced Donald Trump for meeting with “Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán.”
That would be the leader of one of America’s NATO allies. You know the guy—the one who was elected four times in free and fair democratic elections. The leader who is routinely roasted in Hungary’s opposition media, and whose ‘dictatorial rule’ is so iron-fisted that last month, when a scandal erupted over the country’s president, one of the top politicians in his party, Fidesz, having granted a pardon to a man convicted of aiding in the cover-up of pedophilia, both the president and the former justice minister—the two most promising future leaders of Fidesz—resigned.
Some dictatorship! It will be surprising, though, if any U.S. media outlets who repeat the Biden team’s smear of Orbán also note that the allegation has no basis in fact. None.
Let’s not hold our breath. As it happens, earlier that day in Budapest, I dined with friends visiting the city from Western Europe. They were curious to know how I liked living in the Hungarian capital. It’s pretty great, I said.
“How do you cope with the lack of press freedom?” one of them asked, genuinely concerned.
I had heard it all before. “What do you know about the media situation here?” I asked.
“Only what I read in our newspapers,” said one of my dining companions.
“They lie,” I said. And then I explained the situation with the Hungarian media as best I could. The best account I know of comes from Boris Kálnoky, a distinguished former correspondent for Die Welt who now teaches journalism in Budapest. In this essay answering Western critics of Hungary’s journalism environment, Kálnoky writes that press model accepted by peoples in the former Communist countries of Europe is much different from that of the West. Journalism in the East “is not a check on power” but rather “an instrument of power.”
Kálnoky goes on to give details about the Hungarian media landscape that never make it into Western media accounts, which inevitably inform the kind of judgment that my European dining companions made. In my nearly three years in Hungary, I have met people who make a believable case that they were unfairly savaged by the right-wing press. I have also met people on the right who were treated just this way by the country’s left-wing press. In a couple of relatively mild cases, it happened to me too.
That was quite an education as to how the media work in Hungary. It’s not like that in the United States. I prefer the U.S. model, but the idea that it is without grave faults these days is risible.
Recently in elite American media circles, there was a mini-scandal when Adam Rubenstein, a former conservative editorial page staffer at The New York Times (yes, they used to exist), published a much-read essay in the liberal magazine The Atlantic, talking about his tumultuous period at the world’s most influential newspaper. Rubenstein opened with an anecdote to set the stage for the ideological madness inside the newspaper. He told of an orientation workshop that the paper’s Human Resources department set up for new hires, in which they were asked to name their favorite sandwich.
Rubenstein, poor guy, named a chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A, a popular fast-food chain often demonized on the left because its owner is a Christian who, unusually for U.S. corporate leaders, for years declined to donate to LGBT causes. The Times HR staffer chided Rubenstein for his choice, saying that “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.”
A chorus of left-wing Times writers rose up to denounce the claim as a transparent lie. But it wasn’t true. It really did happen. The Atlantic fact-checked it before printing, and it turns out that Rubenstein had told a number of people the story right after it happened—including prominent Times columnist David Brooks. Even Jonathan Chait, a left-wing columnist at the liberal magazine New York, complained about the lying Times writers, saying that their reflexive denials of problems on the left hurts the credibility of liberal critics of the right.
The reason the Chick-fil-A mini-scandal drew so much attention in American media circles is because it reveals an important fact about the elite media: that it cannot be trusted to provide a fair, accurate, and balanced view of the world. This particular incident happened at the Times, but it could have gone on at any number of top media outlets—and even some not-so-big ones. The U.S. media landscape, at least at the elite levels, which matter most, is ideologically occupied territory. It is scarcely any different in Great Britain. I would be shocked to discover otherwise in other western European countries.
Fortunately, it’s not as hard for Americans and Britons to learn when their media are lying to them. Thanks to the Internet, and Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter/X, the Anglosphere now has a number of alternative sources of information. But when it comes to non-English-speaking countries, ordinary Americans and Britons are at the mercy of the accounts presented in our own media.
Indeed, as we continued our conversation, my European dinner hosts on Thursday revealed that they were quite critical of the bias in Western media. One of them even had bitter personal experience on that front. It was easy for me to connect the lies they know from their own experience that Western media tell, with the fact that these same media don’t suddenly become trustworthy when it comes to Hungary. I don’t fault my friends; until I first visited Hungary, I had been as trusting of the Western media’s reporting on the country as they were.
When it comes to LGBT matters, the American press hews to an official line with a rigidity that might have embarrassed Pravda and Izvestia reporters in the Soviet Union. The government doesn’t make them do it; they choose to blind themselves, for ideological reasons.
This week, independent journalist Michael Shellenberger and his team released a blockbuster report based on leaked documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). It revealed that WPATH physicians and medical staff have had deep and detailed knowledge of how uncertain are medical science and treatment protocols for treating gender-dysphoric youth—but pressed ahead with them anyway, while accusing critics of denying science and hating trans youth.
The story—which is massively documented with WPATH’s own leaked materials—was picked up by conservative outlets in the US, as well as the Telegraph and Daily Mail in the UK, and Canada’s National Post. From The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major mainstream U.S. publications? As of this writing, two days after the news broke, there has been nothing.
If a transgender tree falls in the forest, so to speak, but the elite U.S. media refuse to hear it, it might as well not have happened. Ordinary Americans may not even know what they don’t know about big and important issues.
Which brings us back to the “dictator” smear of Viktor Orbán. What if the Orbán government’s law enforcement officials ordered banks to monitor their customers’ activities, and to report on them outside of normal legal procedures? A report this week by a House of Representatives investigative committee produced evidence that federal law enforcement agencies directed financial institutions to report to the state customers who were not accused or even suspected of breaking any laws, but whose activity suggested that they might be “domestic extremists”. Said the Congressional report:
For example, federal law enforcement suggested that banks filter Zelle payments using keywords like “MAGA” and “TRUMP” as part of an ostensible investigation into the events on January 6, 2021, and also warned that “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views,” could be evidence of “Homegrown Violent Extremism.”
As of this writing—two days after the House committee made its finding public—there have been no stories about it in the mainstream media. You would think that the press would think the government ordering banks to spy on innocent customers and report to law enforcement would concern journalists in a liberal democracy. You would be wrong. But don’t forget: Hungary is the dictatorship.
In 2022, the German government set up a program encouraging the country’s citizens to report each other to authorities if they expect someone of saying or believing something that violates Germany’s “constitutional order”. You can be fired on the basis of an unproven accusation. As Boris Kálnoky wrote at the time, “What would happen if Orbán did what Germany just did?”
We all know the answer, or should. And that tells you something important about reporting not only about Hungary, but about the European Right in general.
The fact that Donald Trump, for all his troubles, is not only going to be the GOP presidential nominee again, but is also, at this point, likely to win the election, speaks volumes about how many Americans refuse to trust the media and other normative institutions. As we know from watching how the media and other elites reacted to Trump in his first term, none of this will provoke critical introspection in that class; rather, they will only increase their hatred of the normies for not believing what they are told.
No, Hungary is not a dictatorship, and neither is the United States, nor the United Kingdom, nor the countries of western Europe. But the kind of totalitarianism emerging today does not require complete state control, as in the past. In the west, it can be enough simply to call someone a racist, a transphobe, or some other kind of bigot, to ruin their professional and personal lives. The government doesn’t have to get involved at all.
Here’s an example. In 2021, atheist left-wing (but anti-woke) philosopher Peter Boghossian was driven out of his progressive university in Oregon over its persecution of him for challenging the woke narrative. In his resignation letter, Boghossian charged that the publicly funded university had become a “social justice factory” that suppressed freedom of thought and expression.
In early 2022, Boghossian came to Budapest, the dread capital of darkest Orbánistan, as a visiting fellow at Matthias Corvinus Collegium. When I met him a month after his arrival, the liberal prof was thrilled to be here, telling me that he has more actual freedom to say and teach what he wants to in that conservative Hungarian college than in many U.S. colleges and universities.
This is a fact—an inconvenient one for the progressive narrative, but a fact all the same. The world can see that the American president, due to his advanced age, has only a shaky grasp on the facts. But what’s his campaign team’s excuse? And what’s the American media’s?
