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In March, Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, gave a speech commemorating an uprising against the Hapsburg-ruled Austrian Empire in 1848—a famous year of revolutions across Europe—and took aim at what he sees as the imperialists of today, in dark, militaristic language. He accused “politicians, judges, journalists, bogus civil society organizations, and political activists” in Hungary of being in league with foreign powers, and referred to them as “bugs” and a “shadow army” that he intends to “disperse.” “They are the latter-day Hapsburg troops, the minions of Brussels, paid to do the empire’s bidding against their own country. They have been here too long. They have survived too much. They have received money from too many places,” Orbán added, referring to the European Union, which is based in Brussels. “The spring winds bring floodwater. Let it carry them off.”
Last month, Fidesz, Orbán’s party, introduced a bill, with the innocuous-sounding title “On the Transparency of Public Life,” that essentially aims to legislate his rant. The bill would allow Hungary’s (decidedly less innocuous-sounding) “Sovereignty Protection Office” to recommend the blacklisting of organizations, including news outlets, that receive funding from abroad and are deemed a threat to sovereignty—an incredibly broad designation that, per Politico, includes activities such as “influencing public opinion, promoting democratic debate, or challenging state-defined values like Christian culture and traditional family roles.” Blacklisted organizations would be banned from receiving further foreign funds and subjected to all sorts of onerous requirements and penalties, including strict asset-disclosure rules for their leaders, the possibility of searches and seizures, and fines up to twenty-five times the value of the foreign funding in question; in some cases, organizations deemed not to be in compliance could be forcibly shuttered. The law could apply to donations of as little as five euros (less than six US dollars), including from the EU, of which Hungary is a member. According to Balkan Insight, the legislation is expected to go up for a vote next week—and to pass, given that Fidesz dominates parliament—though it could be amended.
Orbán’s Hungary is often cited as a model for what President Trump and some of those around him hope to do in the US, and Orbán’s speech, suggesting a shadowy conspiracy of foreigners, liberal elites, and the media, certainly called to mind current right-wing American discourse (even if it’s hard to imagine Trump inveighing against the Austrian yoke). And yet the bill proposed by Fidesz more closely resembles a tool of authoritarianism pioneered by, and still most closely associated with, a different superpower: Russia, which passed a law in 2012 taking aim at NGOs that receive foreign funding and has since significantly expanded its scope, to the point where officials invoked it, in 2023, to arrest Alsu Kurmasheva, a US and Russian dual national who works for the US-backed international broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. (Kurmasheva was freed last year, as part of a prisoner swap.) Critics of the Hungarian bill have likened it to Russia’s law. Péter Magyar, the leader of Hungary’s opposition, accused the government of “copying its master, Vladimir Putin.” The International Press Institute and partner organizations described the bill as “a direct threat to core EU values of media freedom and media pluralism,” and warned that it would offer “a foothold for Russian-style strangling of independent media from within the bloc itself.”
As I and others have noted before, Russia’s law taking aim at supposed “foreign agents” carries, aside from its sharp punitive burden, a rhetorical stigma with roots in the country’s Soviet past. IPI and its partners say that Hungary’s bill would “effectively represent the first foreign-agent-style law” to take root within the EU. But this isn’t to say that the spread of such laws outside of the Russian context is a new development: as I documented in 2023, following the arrest of Kurmasheva, a contagion effect appeared to be well underway across the globe, particularly in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, but also beyond it. The details of such measures—and whether they explicitly invoked “foreign agents”—differed by country, but they generally have sought to complicate the existence of civil society groups that receive funding from foreign actors, usually very much including news organizations. One example I cited in 2023 was actually that of Hungary, which had already, in 2017, passed legislation requiring NGOs to disclose foreign funding. When I wrote, foreign-agent-type laws appeared to be on their way to passage in Kyrgyzstan and the Republika Srpska, a Serb-dominated subnational unit of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Kazakhstan had effectively adopted a foreign-agent register using a “sneaky” backdoor mechanism.
This trend has not abated in the interim, and this year has already seen some significant developments. In February, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that Russia was set to once again expand its foreign-agent crackdown, this time by requiring those designated as foreign agents to open special bank accounts from which they would be banned from withdrawing funds as long as they remained on the register, but Russian officials could directly take fines for supposed noncompliance with the law; meanwhile, the country continued to add new journalists to the register—from foreign broadcasters including RFE/RL, its sister newsroom Voice of America, the BBC, and Germany’s Deutsche Welle—and continued to issue fines to those already on it. Also in February, the Republika Srpska finally passed its own foreign-agent law. In early May, the president of Slovakia, which is currently run by a press-bashing populist, signed into law a bill requiring NGOs to disclose their funding that critics likened to Russia’s law—though explicit “foreign agent” language was dropped from the text. Two weeks ago, El Salvador—which has taken an increasingly worrying authoritarian turn under the Trump-allied populist Nayib Bukele—passed a law requiring recipients of foreign funds to register and pay taxes on the money, among other things. Óscar Martínez, the editor of the famed Salvadoran newsroom El Faro, told CPJ that the law is vague, and could even be applied to freelancers who receive honoraria or stipends from foreign sources, adding that it appears “designed to suffocate the press.”
Both the Republika Srpska and El Salvador previously withdrew plans for such laws following international pressure—the former did so after I wrote in 2023, citing a need to further harmonize its plans with European standards (Bosnia and Herzegovina is not yet an EU member, but is a candidate to join)—only to eventually pass versions of them. Similar is true of the nation of Georgia, which I also wrote about in 2023. Back then, the country’s Russian-aligned government had proposed a foreign-agent law, only to shelve it following mass protests. (As I noted, demonstrators chanted “No to the Russian law.”) Last year, however, the government reintroduced the bill, and this time, it passed, despite further protests and an initial veto from Georgia’s pro-European president. In October, ahead of crucial elections, which the ruling Georgian Dream party would go on to win, I wrote that news organizations that receive foreign funding had refused to comply with the law, including by registering their headquarters abroad; CPJ reported recently that the law effectively “remains unimplemented.” Earlier this year, however, the government passed a second foreign-agents law aimed at tightening the first; it went into effect on Saturday. Newsrooms surveyed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project suggested that they still don’t plan to comply. But the head of a journalism group suggested to CPJ that continued defiance is “a risk many media workers will not take.” (“I don’t want to go to jail,” she added.)
In a twist, officials in Georgia have insisted that the new law is an exact replica not of anything Russian, but of a US law: the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. As I noted in 2023, FARA is, technically, the oldest foreign-agent law in the world: it was passed in 1938, aimed at curbing the spread of Nazi propaganda, and still imposes reporting requirements on people and entities seen as taking direction from a “foreign principal”; the act fell into relative disuse after World War II, but has recently seen an uptick in application. FARA has not typically been applied against media outlets (which enjoy some exemptions under the law), and is subject to judicial oversight, leading experts to caution against likening it to Russia’s law and its copycats (even if Russia has also claimed inspiration from FARA). Maxim Krupskiy, an expert on foreign-agent laws, told me in 2023 that in practice, “the more authoritarian the regime in a country, the worse the effect of this legislation on society”; while Georgia may see the FARA comparison as legitimizing given that the US is a democracy, observers have expressed concern that the law will in reality be abused to crack down on critical speech due to a lack of US-style checks and balances. And yet FARA has been used against at least one media outlet in the US—the first Trump administration demanded that the Russian state broadcaster RT register under it—and some US observers continue to warn that the law’s breadth and application in cases that are not on their face about journalism could pose a threat to press freedom. (The US now, of course, has a government that seems keen on using regulatory levers to chill press freedom, even if there’s so far no indication of it weaponizing FARA. In what could be seen as an irony, the new Trump administration has curbed one source of foreign funding to outlets now being targeted by foreign-agent measures, including in both Georgia and Hungary, by gutting the US Agency for International Development.)
When I wrote in 2023, the EU was also said to be considering FARA-type measures in a bid to crack down on undeclared foreign influence over civil-society institutions in the bloc, particularly from Russia and China, drawing pushback from hundreds of civil-society groups, which warned of “unintended consequences” and perceived hypocrisy. (As I noted at the time: “Various observers have argued that democracies must strike a tricky balance here: between stigmatizing civil-society groups (and the appearance of hypocrisy in doing so) and a real need for transparency at a time when murky cross-border influence campaigns are spreading.”) Otherwise, the EU has served as a bulwark, or tried to, against the spread of more overtly weaponized foreign-agent laws within and just beyond its borders: pressure from the bloc initially helped to stymie the push in Georgia (which had also applied to join the EU), while an EU court eventually slapped down Hungary’s 2017 foreign-funding disclosure law. But the tide appears to be rising against the bloc.
After Orbán’s party introduced its new bill recently, thousands of Hungarians took to the streets in protest, with banners that included an EU flag with the word “HELP” emblazoned across it. Shortly after the bill was introduced, the IPI and its partners urged the EU to mount a “swift and forceful” response, by fast-tracking a legal challenge and considering taking other punitive measures in the interim; a number of European lawmakers have called for a freeze in Hungary’s European funding, and, as Deutsche Welle noted, the bloc could determine that Hungary is in breach of its fundamental principles and suspend some of its participation rights, though this seems unlikely. While Orbán has consolidated significant control over Hungary and its media, his party isn’t necessarily pushing the new bill from a position of strength; as numerous observers have noted, Magyar’s opposition is pulling ahead in the polls ahead of elections next year. But Orbán has stacked the odds against his opponents, and the bill looks like a particularly extreme example of that. Fighting back can’t wait till next year.
Other notable stories:
- For CJR, Lauren Watson tracks the progress of a piece of state-level legislation that, if passed, would force “Big Tech to compensate press organizations in Oregon for a portion of the value that news generates on major platforms,” and be “the first law of its kind in the United States.” The state senator behind the bill modeled it on prior efforts “in Australia and Canada, where such laws have gone into effect, and in California and New Jersey, which have made similar attempts,” Watson reports. “If all goes to plan, Big Tech companies, defined by revenue and reach, would be required either to pay a set total sum or to enter arbitration with Oregon’s publishers to settle on payouts.” And 10 percent of the money generated “would support a civic information consortium tasked with providing grants to rural operations and startups.”
- In other media-business news, Business Insider moved last week to lay off more than a fifth of its staff; management said that the company plans to reduce its reliance on “traffic sensitive” functions and to pivot to going “all-in on AI,” but the union that represents staffers at the site said that the real pivot was “away from journalism toward greed.” Elsewhere, GBH, the public broadcaster in Boston, laid off forty-five people, citing “federal funding cuts, rising costs of doing business, and the need to evolve our work to meet audiences’ needs.” In happier news (sort of), the current chaos at federal health agencies is driving traffic and subscriptions to Stat, the health-news site that shares an owner with the Boston Globe; Nieman Lab has more.
- Reporters from the BBC obtained Syrian intelligence documents that shine fresh light on what happened to Austin Tice, an American journalist, after he was abducted in the country in 2012; the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which collapsed late last year, always denied that it was holding Tice, but the documents, as well as testimony to the BBC from former Syrian officials, now confirm that it was, the broadcaster reports. Shortly before leaving office, President Biden said that he believed that Tice was still alive, and his mother has said she has been told as much, but his whereabouts remain unknown. (I wrote about Tice’s case in 2022.)
- Last year, I wrote in this newsletter about Bernhard Poerksen, a German academic who, unusually, had been commissioned by the famed newsmagazine Der Spiegel to critique its work on important topics. (He started with Trump.) Poerksen’s latest essay focuses on the magazine’s coverage of the growing far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. Often, “it is really good,” he writes, including in its “gripping exposés” and “significant degree of linguistic sensitivity.” And yet, in the background “lurk dilemmas that are unfortunately not spelled out with the necessary clarity.”
- And for the Washington Post, Larry Tye makes the case that Good Night, and Good Luck, the drama about Edward R. Murrow’s role in toppling McCarthyism (which is currently running on Broadway, with George Clooney as Murrow), is about the wrong journalist. “Murrow did broadcast two bare-knuckle takedowns of McCarthy,” Tye writes. But the commentator Drew Pearson “went after ‘Low Blow Joe’ six years before Murrow, stayed on the story longer and uniquely ignited the senator’s wrath.”
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