(Source: Budapest Business Journal)
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the U.S. government-funded organization that broadcasts news and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East “where a free press is banned or not fully established,” is set to restart in Hungary, following recent relaunches in Bulgaria and Romania.
During the Cold War, Radio Free Europe – whose motto is “Free Media in Unfree Societies” – was broadcast to Soviet satellite countries. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it wound up the service in Hungary in 1993, considering the collapse of communism to be mission accomplished, recalls a report in The New York Times (NYT) dated September 6.
The article comments that the move to relaunch the service by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, an independent federal agency, reflects Hungary’s drift away from a free and open government under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán[…]
“We’ve done our homework, and we know this has broad backing, and we’re preparing to move forward,” the agency’s chief, John Lansing, is cited as saying. He adds that the service’s initial budget could run up to USD 750,000, and that a bureau would be established in Hungary. He expects a soft launch of the service in May 2020, with a hard launch one year from now.[…]
Continue reading the full article at the Budapest Business Journal.
Note: I seriously doubt “restarting” RFE for Hungary would include any shortwave radio broadcasts. I suspect this would equate to their website and streaming media.
The new romanian and bulgarian broadcasts (restarted in January) are online only, so yes, probably the hungarian will be the same. (Previously it was broadcasted on the 19, 25, 31, 41, 49 meter bands but sometimes jammed.) Plus about the free media: “David B. Cornstein, the U.S. ambassador to Budapest, has reportedly sought assurances from Radio Free Europe that its service would not focus on negative stories about the Hungarian government, or investigative journalism, and that it would not undermine his efforts as ambassador, according to American officials cited by the NYT.”
+ a block of flats wall painting from 2016, about the RFE in 1956 (hungarian revolution against the Soviet union)
https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/kozterkep/photos/08d9f176a2c26966dcf4239d2e370fde_1.jpg
(Unfortunately the RFE broadcasted that time news about the coming support of the “West” which was fake and just caused more deaths. Later its music programs were popular (but still illegal) because the latest hits from the “west”.)
Never listened to RFE but I remember TV commercials about it back in the ’60’s. I will tune in to see what the content is out of curiosity since it has reappeared.
Even incandescent light bulbs might be coming back.
Now if I were a “conspiracy theorist”, I would say that this smells like a “deep state” effort to counter the present wave of nationalism spreading across Europe, and prop up a failing European Union. That is, if I were a “conspiracy theorist”.
And if I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d say the USA has gone back to its bad old Cold War days of spreading propaganda in deliberate, concerted, and targetted attempts to interfere with & undermine the governments of other sovereign nations.
That is, if I were a conspiracy theorist…
Oh my yes, Ron. But to say that the USA was going back to those bad old Cold War days is to imply that they ever went away in the first place. The heartiest laugh the past three years has been the suggestion that certain other nations had “meddled” in our election. That’s been America’s favorite past time since nearly our inception.