RFE Hungarian Broadcasting
A Ross Johnson
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-to-hungary.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.