Civil Liberties Union manager: International media are misrepresenting the reality on the ground in Hungary

Another day, another Soros network associate admits to a strong bias against Hungary. In the past few weeks, Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet has published the details of several Skype conversations, revealing a picture of what goes on behind closed doors at George Soros’ NGOs and international media circles. In these interviews, insiders that know the machine well speak candidly about, inter alia, the strong bias against Hungary and Poland in western press.

The interviews in question have so far included Andrej Nosko, former director of the Open Society Foundations, i.e., the Soros Foundation; Mátyás Kálmán, former journalist for Index and 24.hu; and Dalibor Rohac, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

In a story published this morning, we can hear the views of a new interviewee, Márton Asbóth, one of the current project managers of the fiercely anti-Orbán Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (TASZ). Asbóth spoke about, among other things, the strong prejudice of Western press against Hungary.

“I think that western countries have a very strange narrative or point of view, which tends to make them believe that Hungary is a very terrible place, where democracy is a non-existent thing. It's like Belarus or something like that,” Asbóth said on the recording obtained by news portal Magyar Nemzet.

Asbóth quickly made clear that although the foreign press reports that authoritarian regimes are in power in Hungary and Poland, both countries are “good places to live in.”

According to the TASZ project leader, it is not like there is a dictator who wants to change the "good little country that Hungary was during the regime change. This would be a very simple story, but there are much deeper reasons behind it. And for many years, the international press has refused to acknowledge this.”

The reason for this, in Asbóth’s view, is that foreign journalists often don’t want to go into too much detail about Hungary. Sometimes, he continued, these journalists don’t even want to be properly informed on the situation in the country.

When the interviewer, who has not been identified, asked: "Is it fair to say that sometimes the international media is perhaps somewhat misrepresenting the reality on the ground in Hungary because they don't have all of this information,” Asbóth replied succinctly that "yes, that is what happens.”