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The trouble starts with the law itself. In the early transition period, when a short-lived 1990 law was in place, a series of what became known as the “media wars” pitched the Parliamentary opposition against the government over the Prime Minister’s right, unilaterally, to displace the head of Hungarian broadcasting (at the time a fairly distinguished sociologist named Elemer Hankiss). The fight went to the Constitutional Court which determined that a more elaborate process had to be followed, at least until a new statute determining the power to hire and fire. In 1995, after intense controversy, a law was passed, creating three large governing boards of approximately thirty members for supervising the public broadcasters, two thirds nominated by civic organizations and roughly one third by the political parties. The one-third that arose from the parties would be a Presidium with more responsibility than the civic representatives. That group would, for example, in case of a vacancy, search for a new director-general by open application and, when satisfied, nominate that person to the governing board as a whole. The difficulties inherent in this complicated compromise have become even more evident in 1998. When Istvan Petak was relieved of his duties, the Presidium members or committee of Chairs, as the party-appointed representatives of the governing board was sometimes called, began the process of looking for a replacement. Two major problems immediately surfaced. First, few candidates of quality would submit themselves for consideration for a process that could become highly politicized. Since members were party-appointed, a prospective director would be immediately suspect for having merely survived the nomination process. And only a “grey” candidate could survive scrutiny both by the parties of the right, the party of the left, and the party of the liberal middle. More problematic was the result of the elections of 1998 on the composition of the key portion of MTV’s governing board. When the broadcasting law was passed in 1995, there was a rough balance between the governing coalition and the opposition in the makeup of the board. Indeed, the statute, as drafted, was designed to maintain such a balance. Because of extraordinary aspects of the 1998 election, the balance of the board switched markedly to the government coalition, and the liberal and leftish opposition (which had been in power 1994-1998) considered the post-election board fatally flawed. The result was a stalemate. No candidate to run MTV could get the necessary two-thirds vote of the party-appointed committee of chairs. And under another wrinkle of the 1995 law, the committee itself had to resign if it was incapable of arriving at a nominee or at least a new application. Because of the vigorous complaints from the liberal opposition party, the Federation of the Free Democrats, reconstitution of the committee was delayed. The result was ironic. In the long interim, MTV would be run by its deputy director, without a mandate from the governing board. And, without an effective governing board, the explicit relations on policy and budget would be between the deputy (now acting director) and the government itself, without the buffer of the board created by the 1995 law. The episode, dramatic in itself, provides important insights into the problems of the Hungarian broadcasting structure. The Hungarian parliament was trying to remedy too many ills of the past with its 1995 law and the result was the statutory equivalent of a badly misshapen camel: a horse created by a sharply-divided committee. The idea of a public board, with representatives appointed by civic groups, was benign enough and was required to be copied from similar bodies existing in Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and elsewhere. Even such a board, however, was considered, in some quarters, as potentially mischievous and interfering with the task of fashioning a strong and independent public sector. The Hungarian gloss on the idea of a public body, with each political party having its designated representative and the group of those representatives having special powers, made what was supposed to be apolitical intensely political, or potentially so. What was considered by some as a well-meaning representation of the Hungarian political landscape emerged as a critical flaw in post-Soviet transitional broadcasting laws. The events surrounding MTV contribute to the crippling of a public service broadcasting just at the time when clarity and ambition in its reshaping is precisely necessary. The emergence of a vigorous commercial broadcasting sector (including the privatization of the second state channel), which is a very basic step towards real freedom of press in Hungary, has meant that MTV is the only terrestrial public channel and that it has lost much of its audience. Peter Molnar
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