Developments in Hungary have led Ambassador Mark Palmer and others to
suggest resumption of RFE/RL broadcasts to Hungary.
Richard Cummings has posted on his blog a historical review of the Hungarian
Service by Geza Ekecs and Janos Kund.
http://coldwarradios.blogspot.com/2012/01/rfe-to-renew-broadcasting-t...
ry.html

I share  below my personal account of the end of RFE Hungarian broadcasting
in 1993.

A Half-Century of RFE/RL Broadcasting to Hungary;  
The Endgame

A. Ross Johnson

(Remarks prepared for a conference on RFE Hungarian broadcasting, Szechenyi
National Library, Budapest, October 5-6, 2000.  Published in Országos
Széchényi Konuvtar (Budapest, National Széchenyi Library, 2001)

My subject is the termination of RFE/RL broadcasts to Hungary in 1993.  Let
me first discuss Hungarian broadcast policy in the late 1980s, then cover
the transfer of  programming to Hungary beginning in 1989, and finally
address the ending of the broadcasts in 1993.  

Broadcast Policy

In 1988, the Soviet Empire was in decay.  Hungary had a less repressive
political system than any other country in the Soviet sphere, but was still
not free. Having returned to Munich in late 1988 as Director of Radio Free
Europe (with responsibility for broadcasts to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the three Baltic states),  I recommended to
the RFE/RL President in mid-1989  the following course of action:

“… I intend to make some internal RFE budget reallocations in FY 1990 to
strengthen the Baltic and Hungarian Services.  On balance, I opt for
priority on promoting change (de-Leninization, political pluralism, end of
Soviet empire) through our broadcasts in key areas where change is ongoing
or imminent over attempting to focus most on states or areas where the old
systems remain intact.  In my view, we should be aiming to reinforce
democratic breakthroughs where these are most likely… “

Addressing more specifically Hungary, I suggested:

“Hungary has the best chance of democratizing internally and "Finlandizing"
itself from the USSR.  Our relationship to the pluralizing Hungarian media
is, optimally, one of a reinforcing spiral, We deal with oppositional
activities, intra-Party conflict, and Soviet-Hungarian issues, for example,
that official media and some independent media in Hungary are still
reluctant to touch.  We will be under increasing competition from a variety
of independent and commercial media which may appeal to our listeners but
which will not serve (nor pretend to serve) our political functions.  We
will at the same time have new opportunities that involve radically
different technical, organizational, and personnel approaches.  For example,
we should explore renting  FM air time in Hungary,  extending the new Bureau
activities, and temporarily hiring some talent from Hungary. Additional
resources are needed.”

Hungary was thus a priority.  Our programming embraced  major themes that
could not be discussed openly or fully in the domestic media.  As one
example of this emphasis, programming on Hungarian topics on June 8, 1989,
covered the following topics:

•             The Hungarian Communist Party’s cautious reaction to the
crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in China

•             Implications of Polish and Chinese developments for Hungary

•             Preparations of the oppositional Committee for Historical
Justice and the independent artists’ group to rebury Imre Nagy and otherwise
honor the 1956 Revolution

•             Debate within the Democratic Forum on the massacre in
Masonmagyarovar in October 1956

•             The new American initiative to support financially the private
sector in Hungary and Poland.

•             Minister of State Poszgay’s interview in Germany with Die Zeit
and RFE/RL.  

Return to the Homeland  

An early RFE fund-raising poster had touted RFE broadcasts to East European
youth as the “in sound from outside.”  In 1989 the  “in sound” came home.
Some of the program contributions cited in the example above came from
freelancers inside Hungary, a practice that began in early 1989 and became a
daily feature by the middle of the year.  This practice revolutionized
RFE/RL programming.  It was institutionalized with the establishment of a
news and production bureau in Budapest in October 1989   (followed by the
opening of bureaus in Prague and Warsaw in 1990, and many other countries
thereafter).  

RFE/RL sought, without a road map, to find its way to a new programming role
in Hungary.  We covered in early 1990 the first free parliamentary election
since the end of Party rule anywhere in the Soviet sphere.  We recognized
the danger of a bias toward the Young Democratic party [Fidesz] – with which
many of our freelancers identified.  To prepare electoral coverage, the
Hungarian Service Director spent two weeks in Hungary in late 1989  and met
with leaders of all the major and some minor parties.  He told them of our
plans to provide balanced coverage of the elections, stressed the importance
for them of accessible press spokesmen,  and encouraged them to turn to us
with campaign information.  We subsequently assigned a series of senior
editors to Budapest to oversee coverage.  Our Budapest Bureau and studio
and a network of local freelancers were essential to this coverage.  Our
experience in covering this first free Hungarian election served as a model
for subsequent election coverage elsewhere.  

Between 1989 and 1993, operating from Budapest and Munich, RFE sought to
contribute to the emergence of a free and pluralistic Hungarian media.  It
sought to promote national reconciliation between Hungarians and non
-Hungarians in neighboring countries.   It  carried news about the historic
transformation in Hungary to the other states of the region.

This was a role warmly  welcomed by the new post-Communist  Hungarian
government.  It invited the Board for International Broadcasting to meet in
Budapest in  fall  1990 – its first meeting in the broadcast area.  On that
occasion, Prime Minister Jozef Antal  said that RFE had an important
continuing  role as a medium of news and information independent of internal
politics and able to spread  Western, trans-Atlantic values in Hungary.  

Such political endorsements notwithstanding, the audience for RFE/RL’s
Hungarian broadcasts declined from a regular (weekly) listenership of 12
percent of the adult population in 1989 to 3 % in 1992.  To be sure, foreign
radio listenership declined  throughout the Communist world as political
repression ended, censorship was abolished, and the quantity (if not always
the quality) of information increased.  But audience decline was greater in
Hungary than in other RFE/RL broadcast countries at the time.  The  extent
of this decline is attributable primarily to RFE/RL’s inability  to obtain
local Hungarian transmission facilities on AM or FM.  In contrast, in
Czechoslovakia and Poland, RFE/RL leased local AM country-wide networks in
1990 and was  better able to maintain audiences.

There is no simple explanation for this failure to secure local transmission
capabilities in Hungary, when these were available in  other countries and
when VOA and BBC were able to lease such facilities  in Hungary. RFE/RL
explored many opportunities for local broadcasting. The Antal Government
promised such local broadcasting as soon as a new media law was passed – but
was unable to overcome the political logjam on this issue among the
democratic political parties and was unable or unwilling to make  an
exception for RFE/RL,  as was done in other countries.  Perhaps RFE/RL
insisted too much on placing its entire program (still some 12 hours daily)
on local radio.  But there is also another explanation.  Since Hungary had
experienced gradual and not sudden democratic change, Hungarian Radio (which
controlled transmission facilities) did not experience the same leadership
change as occurred in Polish and Czechoslovak Radio in 1989-1990, when
prominent anti-Communists took the helm.  Hungarian Radio management,
lacking identification with RFE/RL programming, evidently had less interest
in a local RFE/RL presence than did its counterparts at the time in Poland
and Czechoslovakia.

Agonizing Reappraisal  

The Clinton Administration assumed office in early 1993 with the intention
of phasing out RFE/RL broadcasts.  The  budget guidelines of the Office of
Management and Budget for Fiscal Year 1994 envisaged massive cuts in the
RFE/RL budget.  In October 1993, the Board for International Broadcasting
(which was also the RFE/RL Board of Directors) held two meetings in
Washington in which it  faced the difficult task of terminating or
transforming major RFE/RL operations in order to  preserve the organization.
It decided to close the RFE/RL Research Institute, a decision later modified
to embrace partnership with the Soros Foundations in an attempt to continue
essential research at much lower cost.  It decided to end Czech and Polish
and Hungarian broadcasting, a decision later modified to allow the spin-off
to Prague and Warsaw of  subsidiary programming organizations that would
seek other funding partners.  But local spin-off assumed local transmission
capabilities, and these were absent in the Hungarian case.  A spin-off of
Hungarian broadcasts was thus not possible, and the broadcasts ended in fall
1993.  

A Mission Possible

RFE’s Hungarian service was founded in 1950 (like other RFE  services) in
the belief that the darkness that descended over Central and Eastern Europe
in the late 1940s was neither inevitable nor permanent, but rather a tragedy
to be overcome.

Many Hungarians have testified to the role played by RFE over 42 years in
helping Hungary return to the community of free nations. Prime Minister
Antal wrote to RFE/RL in June 1990:  "Radio Free Europe has … given us the
gift of truth about our own country and the world at large, and has done so
at  a time when telling the truth was counted as a crime against the state.”
President Goncz wrote to RFE/RL in 1991 that "one of the important
possibilities of expression  for those in Hungary who raised their voices
for changes was Radio Free Europe."  Just as for Walesa in Poland and Havel
in Czechoslovakia, RFE served as a megaphone by which independent figures in
Hungary, denied access to local media,  could speak to their countrymen.  

Romanian President Constantinescu has correctly said that “A Communist
country could only exist by means of lies and lack of information.”  The
Iron Curtain was supported by “information curtain.”  But Communist leaders
deluded themselves that they could insulate their countries from the global
information environment in the 20th century.   The East German writer Stefan
Heym has noted the irony of Communist leaders who professed to subscribe to
an ideology of inevitable scientific and  technical progress but who failed
utterly to understand  “… that borders and barriers no longer applied, since
they were easily overcome with pictures and sounds,  and that a new form of
competition with the enemy had developed, in which not courage on the
barricades but sophisticated presentation of the respective advantages of
each side through electronic media shaped public opinion and determined
political victory.”

In successfully carrying out its mission for nearly 45 years, RFE’s
Hungarian Service  contributed to the reemergence of a Hungary  again
independent,  European, and free.  Its success demonstrated that   no
tyranny can withstand the sustained impact of uncensored news and
information.