Two days ago a garbled, close to incomprehensible, article appeared in Pesti Srácok, perhaps the most right-extremist organ of the Fidesz/Orbán government’s media empire. The article with great fanfare announced that Pesti Srácok had acquired documents about the activities and goals of billionaire George Soros that “surpass one’s wildest expectations.” The article alleges that there are a number of documents in the DCLeaks collection that “prove that the stock market shark has a stake in discrediting the Hungarian government.”
My first reaction was that the staff of Pesti Srácok got mixed up, took out the wrong file, and mistook 2016 for 2017. Because it was a little over a year ago that the Russian cyber-espionage group called Fancy Bear released on its website 2,576 files, mostly related to George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Fancy Bear is apparently connected to GRU (Glavnoye razvedytel’noye upravleniye), Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate. Soon afterward, several far-right websites, like tmn.today, zerohedge.com, and newstarget.com worked hard to portray some of these documents as evidence of the “evil plan” of Soros and his organizations to use the refugee crisis as an opportunity to manipulate immigration policies throughout the world.
In fact, most of the information revealed in the current article by Pesti Srácok is a rehash of earlier articles that appeared in right-wing English-language publications. Since the Soros documents are no longer available on the internet, it is hard to fathom why Pesti Srácok bothered to provide two non-functioning URLs as proof.
Why did Pesti Srácok dredge up this old story? My suspicion is that the article was ordered from above because the Orbán government had decided to accelerate the attacks on George Soros and his network. They needed a “reason” to tighten the screws and even go as far as ordering a full-fledged investigation by the ministry of interior, which is in charge of the national security services. So, I was somewhat amused at the naiveté of István Gusztos in Gépnarancs who believed that “the government had to react to this information that had reached the press.” Balázs Hidvéghi, the Fidesz spokesman, and János Lázár, head of the prime minister’s office, “had to join this despicable drivel.” I’m afraid the opposite is true.
One could spend days trying to track down the origins of this cut-and-paste job, and perhaps someone with lots of extra time and curiosity could write an essay on Fidesz’s manipulation of news on the basis of this one article. Practically every sentence, every quotation is suspect. It is hard to describe this hodgepodge of lies, misinformation, and irrelevant information that has nothing to do with Hungary, like the Soros Foundation’s support for the Baltimore Education Research Consortium or its lending a helping hand to the American Journalism Review in connection with the crisis in American journalism.
One section of the article might be of paramount importance as far as the Orbán government’s possible moves against Hungarian and foreign journalists are concerned. The subhead reads: “Bribed journalists and contracts to manipulate the media.” The example given was a contract with an alleged entrepreneur (vállalkozó), actually a research institute, called the Centre d’etudes et de recherches internationales “whose task was to prove ‘contrary opinions’ about French-Ukrainian relations. The contract also stated that the entrepreneur (sic) had to write press reviews.” The text that reads “to provide a brief account of how Russia has tried to influence the French debate on Ukraine through domestic actors and outlets” was interpreted as an instruction regarding the kind of information that should appear in the French press. After the description of the influence allegedly exerted on the French media, the article claims that similar “media purchases” were obtained in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece. The article naturally spent quite a bit of time on the Soros Foundation’s list of about 200 EP members who might be sympathetic to some of the ideas of the Open Society. This list, which is still available on the internet, is also old hat.
It was after the appearance of this article that Balázs Hidvéghi, communication director of Fidesz, announced that the government has “concrete proof that Brussels has fallen into the captivity of the Soros network.” Hidvéghi claimed that Soros gave $6 million to 90 different organizations to influence the decision-making process of the European Union. The Soros network specifically targets Hungary by supporting individuals who spread fake news about Hungary.
A few hours later János Lázár, during his regular Thursday afternoon press conference, talked about the same problem. The government wants to clarify whether the attempts by George Soros’s organization in Brussels touched—and if it did, how—the sovereignty of Hungary. The government should initiate an investigation into the “authenticity” of the DCLeaks documents, I can’t fathom why. Sándor Pintér, minister of interior, is to prepare a memorandum on whether the transportation of migrants to the Hungarian border and the “siege of the Hungarian border” during the fall of 2015 was organized or accidental.
What the Hungarian government is really trying to prove is that the Soros network substantially influenced decision-making on the “forums of the European Union.” All those negative decisions, in the Hungarian government’s opinion, might have been “written on the computers of George Soros’s colleagues.” This could mean either members of the NGOs receiving money from the Soros Foundation or journalists. Here Lázár obliquely referred to the Pesti Srácok article which claimed that “Soros bought journalists and media sites in the interest of spreading his ideas.” As far as Hungary is concerned, Lázár pretty much accused Soros of paying journalists to write articles that show Hungary and the Hungarian government in a negative light.
This morning Viktor Orbán repeated some of the same accusations and gave misleading information about the DCLeaks documents during his regular bi-weekly interview on Magyar Rádió, but that deserves a separate post. For the time being, Hungarian and foreign journalists are not frightened. Both Bloomberg and The Financial Times published reports under the headlines “Hungary orders spies to target Soros ‘Empire’” and “Orban calls for Hungarian spy agencies to probe ‘Soros empire’ of NGOs.” And this is just the beginning.