The outrage over the newly passed media legislation in Hungary has been broadly expressed, ranging from European leaders to NGOs to Internet activists. It is by now very clear that the law is primarily aimed to stifle domestic dissent by threatening news organizations and media outlets with economic fines. The amount of money is obviously ridiculous (up to 200 million forints) when taken into account that the minimum salary in Hungary is roughly 73 000 forints per month. Now, media organizations probably have higher revenues than that, but it gives however a perspective on the enormity of the fines and the intimidation effect that it carries with it. Fines may be issued when reporting on such information that it is perceived as countering “public interest”, “common morality”, “national order” or otherwise reported in an “unbalanced way”. Albeit that one of the official reasons for the legislation are to protect children from material that is considered harmful to them (which was tragicomically manifested by warning a local radio channel for playing one of Ice-T’s songs too early in the day), one does not need to be Noam Chomsky to realize that the consequences of the lucid terminology in the legislation will at best lead to a warning for playing one of Ice-T’s songs, and at worst censoring vital information released by Wikileaks.
There is much at stake here and unfortunately Hungary is not alone in passing worrying legislation. The Swedish parliament recently passed a law that obliges the Swedish government to “pre-approve” new services that state owned SVT (TV) and SR (radio) have a desire to launch. Since the kind of terminology used by the government in Hungary would never be accepted in Sweden, the pretext for this legislation is economical.
It is apparent that the fundamental freedoms of expression in the Western world have after the massive releases by Wikileaks reached a very critical point. Those of you that visit WL Central regularly do not have to be illuminated of the consequences regarding limited free speech. I ask of you to inform and spread the severity of the situation to many as possible and take action in as many ways as possible. One of them is to participate in the “Blackout4Hungary” campaign (http://www.blackout4hungary.net/en/).
Hungarian legislation
http://www.parlament.hu/irom39/01747/01747.pdf (In Hungarian)
Swedish legislation
http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/12616/a/158137 (In Swedish)
http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/14036#item158294 Q&A (In Swedish)
The New Mandarins 