“The editorial board of The New York Times, which is ‘hot and bothered’ about Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ‘right-wing, nativist, nationalist politics’, is ‘so woke’ about Hungary”, the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister’s Minister of State for International Communication and Relations Zoltán Kovács wrote in an ironic tone on Wednesday on the abouthungary.hu website in reaction to a recent article on Hungary and Viktor Orbán published in the paper.
According to Mr. Kovács, the “Manhattan clique” was joined this week by a columnist from The Guardian, who is “by coincidence a former professor at the CEU” and who “mourns the sad day when the CEU was forced out of Hungary”.
“Except it wasn’t”, the Minister of State writes, since “it still operates unfettered in Hungary as the fully accredited Közép-europai Egyetem”. “But the CEU, by its own admission, still doesn’t carry out any higher education in the United States”, he added.
According to Mr. Kovács, The New York Times “is losing sleep at night about media balance in Hungary”. “This is a publication that was caught red-handed giving out major advertising discounts to left-wing groups like MoveOn.org, while charging full price to conservative causes”, he writes.
The editorial board claims that Hungary “today has hundreds of pro-government news outlets, compared to 31 in 2015”. “They say nothing about the impressive audience share of Hungarian media – including the largest television channel and the largest online news portal – that remains consistently and vociferously critical of the Orbán Government”, Mr Kovács writes. “Is there a single member of that editorial board that speaks Hungarian?”, the Minister of State asks in the article.