So you’re tired of me writing about all those foreign correspondents who manipulate and distort the news about Hungary? Well, I have good news for you. This week, you don’t have to take my word for it.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called “Being Ferenc Kumin” about an article by a journalist, Péter Erdélyi, at 444.hu in which he complains about the stupidities that the foreign press are writing about Hungary. “I feel just like Ferenc Kumin,” confessed Erdélyi. Knowing his writing and the way 444 pokes fun at me, for Erdélyi that must be a strange feeling indeed.
Well, if that weren’t enough, how’s this? I’m feeling just like Cink’s László Szily.
Difficult to believe, I know. Szily is the maestro at Cink.hu, a popular, irreverent Hungarian blog in the style of Gawker. The site is not exactly, shall we say, a great supporter of the Orbán Government, but it’s often entertaining – even when they’re making fun of me, as they occasionally do.
First, some background. Miklós Radnóti is one of Hungary’s great poets of the 20th century. He was killed in November 1944, in the Holocaust, shot during a forced march in a group of some 3,200 Hungarian Jews and buried in a mass grave. A statue to the poet was erected near the town of Abda in northwestern Hungary, commemorating the place where he died.
Last weekend, a Mercedes crashed into the statue, badly damaging it. Initially it was not clear what had happened. According to police reports released later, however, a 24 year-old male hit the statue by accident with his car in the early morning hours on the way home from a local night spot. But by Monday morning, a somewhat different version of the story was all over the media.
“The ATV article is already writing about the incident as if the statue had been deliberately toppled by some Nazi,” Szily wrote on Monday. “Everyone has gone mad.”
Even the widely read Index.hu fell into the trap, Szily noted. Index reported that “this is not the first such attack on the memory of Miklós Radnóti in recent days,” a reference to the book burning recently in Miskolc, which was roundly condemned by the ruling party.
Leave out the minor detail that the statue incident was an accident, not an attack, and it makes for a good, sensational story.
By Monday, the twisted version was off and running. Klubradio reported that the statue had been, get this, “bulldozed” by the car, implying that it was deliberate and juxtaposed the incident with the book burning. Another outlet ran the story under the headline, “Statue and Books of Hungarian Jewish Writer Targeted,” reporting that “after a car mysteriously drove into a statue commemorating the Hungarian Jewish poet and writer Miklos Radnoti who was killed in the Holocaust, attention is turning to a similar episode in recent weeks where his books were burned.” JTA ran a story based on the Klubradio version but neglected to mention that, as the local mayor had indicated, it turned out to be an accident and that they immediately announced plans to restore the granite statue.
Watching how this story developed, says Cink’s Szily, offers a good example of how the news gets manipulated: “A little negligence, a little sensationalism, a little bias, and soon the article is about something entirely different than what in fact happened.”
Yes, a little.
