Newspaper Closes in Hungary, and Hungarians See Government’s Hand (original) (raw)

Europe|Newspaper Closes in Hungary, and Hungarians See Government’s Hand

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/world/europe/hungary-newspaper-nepszabadsag.html

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

Staff members from the Hungarian newspaper Nepszabadsag outside the company’s offices in Budapest on Sunday. They were denied access.Credit...Zoltan Balogh/European Pressphoto Agency

Oct. 11, 2016

BUDAPEST — Roland Baksa, an investigative reporter at Hungary’s largest opposition newspaper, packed up his computer on Friday. The publication’s parent company had announced that it would move offices over the weekend, and the editor in chief had promised pizza on Sunday to celebrate the move.

But on Saturday, Mr. Baksa found that he could access neither his work email nor the newspaper’s website, including its archives. Mediaworks, the parent company, had replaced the website of the newspaper, Nepszabadsag, with an announcement that it was suspending publication immediately, because of steep circulation losses over the last decade.

Mr. Baksa and many of his roughly 50 colleagues, whose jobs are now in limbo, suspect another motivation: interference from the government of Hungary’s populist, right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, which has reined in government-run media and appears to be wielding increasing influence over privately run news companies as well.

In the newspaper’s final week, it reported that the head of Mr. Orban’s cabinet office had flown to a celebrity wedding by helicopter — an exorbitant expense that he had initially denied. The same week, Mr. Baksa revealed that the governor of the central bank was living in a luxury apartment owned by the president of the Hungarian Banking Association. Earlier, he had reported on the governor’s romance with a young woman who was consequently hired by the central bank for a record salary.

“I was aware these stories might not be to the liking of Viktor Orban’s government,” Mr. Baksa said in an interview, but he was not expecting “the drastic closure of our newsroom.”

The newspaper’s deputy editor in chief, Marton Gergely, said he felt “pretty sure Viktor Orban himself is hiding in the background.”

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT