Just something that they voted down recently: tie EU funding to democracy. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-summit-poland-netherla...
Likely after this EU decision the the killing of index.hu was green lit by Fidesz
Likely after this EU decision the the killing of index.hu was green lit by Fidesz
The Polish Prime Minister's quote is completely butchered to the point of being gibberish:
"Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki hailed the “whole architecture of supervision” as a success." - this sounds like he's happy with the idea of supervision, which the article promptly contradicts a few paragraphs later. Here's a better writeup of what he said, from a polish news site(https://www.pap.pl/en/news/news%2C686607%2Ceur-160-bln-polan...):
"In his view, the conclusions of the summit are a great success from the financial point of view and the whole architecture of supervision over budget funds."
"The Polish PM pointed out that in the deal adopted on Tuesday there is no direct linking between the rule of law and the allocation of EU funds as earlier proposed."
OK, now it's obvious what he means - he's happy that the conclusions of the summit went his way and the architecture of supervision was scaled down or eliminated.
Here's Orban's highly editorialized quote:
"But Orban told reporters he had “thwarted and repelled” efforts to tie disbursement of funds to democratic values."
Only two of those words are actually attributed to him! The rest of the description("tie disbursement of funds to democratic values") is not Orban's interpretation of events, but Reuters'!
Here's a hungarian article(https://hungarytoday.hu/orban-govt-eur-3-bn-funding-brussels...):
"Hungary and Poland thwarted the attempt to have others decide on the funds they are entitled to, the prime minister said in a regular interview to public broadcaster Kossuth Radio"
That's a bit too neutral for Reuters, it doesn't make it sound like this a fight between "good" and "bad" guys. Of course, they could have just used any of Orban's other unhinged quotes:
"The outcome of the recent European Union summit on the bloc’s 2021-2027 budget and its pandemic recovery package in Brussels can be interpreted as the Hungarian and Polish forces having “repelled the international attack of the liberal brigades”, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Friday."
(note how, while the quote is editorialized, the editorial is a passive, neutral, factual description of the events).
It's not like you can't make Orban sound like a lunatic by just quoting him straight up. From the same article:
"These are typically countries that are pro-immigration and hate us because we don’t allow them to enforce their migration policy and because Hungary stops migrants”, he said, adding that they were backed by US financier George Soros."
I agree that good journalism is sorely needed, but it's not obvious that we're getting much of it in our "real" democracies either.
No, I just wanted to add a source about the rule-of-law conditions for funds discussion. As I know no one is fighting for Reuters not to shut down.