The Media Research Center loves its right-wing autocrats, and its current favorite is Hungary’s Viktor Orban. The MRC’s top Orban propagandist, Tom Olohan, combined Orban-fluffing and Soros hate in a Jan. 30 post:
The Trump administration has halted Biden’s funneling of US tax dollars to foreign media outlets dedicated to undermining Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. If that’s an outrage, imagine if Trump used our tax dollars to undermine socialist leaders in Britain or Canada.
Under the Biden administration, the U.S. State Department entrusted two organizations to find media outlets opposed to Orban’s government to receive American taxpayer funding. Recently, one of those organizations, Mertek Media Monitor, shared the news that the funding had been cut off by Trump.
Mertek Media Monitor reposted a Jan. 27 X post by Investigative Journalist Szabolcs Panyi that mourned, “The Trump admin’s suspension of foreign aid also halts support for Hungarian independent media via the ‘U.S. Ambassador’s Independent Media Support Fund.’”
“Independent”? Mertek Media Monitor is a Soros-funded media watchdog that had worked with the Soros-funded Ökotárs Foundation to pick outlets hostile to the government of our NATO ally.
Soros gave $306,147 to the Ökotárs Foundation and $88,113 to Mérték Media Monitor between 2017 and 2022. According to Mertek Media Monitor, the organizations have doled out $815,531.78 of taxpayer dollars (319,213,010 Hungarian Forints) in three rounds of funding.
As we’ve pointed out, Hungary’s media landscape is dominated by pro-Orban outlets that clamp down on opposition messaging. It seems that Olohan, like Orban, wants to censor media in Hungary who aren’t pro-Orban. He also failed to disclose that the MRC is a partner with a right-wing Orban front group in Hungary that presumably also wants to censor any criticism of Orban.
He continued to rant:
Notably, these grants were awarded during Pressman’s tenure. While the State Department and the U.S. Embassy were passing taxpayer dollars to Orban opponents, Pressman was publicly warring with the government he was supposed to be working with. Pressman’s activism includes hostile social media posts, going after Orban at events sponsored by Soros groups, and accusing officials in a country that is known for fighting to keep its citizens safe from antisemitic violence of fomenting antisemitism.
Pressman has even infamously imposed his values on Hungary by attending and even hosting pro-LGBTQ events, which naturally he used as a platform to lash out at Orban and members of his political party Fidesz.
Now Pressman is gone and his beloved project may lose its funds. However, U.S. District judge Loren L. AliKhan (a former DC solicitor general nominated by Biden in 2023) has temporarily blocked the freeze.
Outrageously, the Soros-backed groups featured in this debacle not only chose to fund outlets that viciously attack Orban, a Trump ally but also dutifully helped shuffle American taxpayer money to six separate Soros-backed Hungarian media outlets. Mertek Media Monitor and the Ökotárs Foundation even awarded grants to five of these Soros-backed media outlets twice!
In fact, Orban invokes anti-Semitic tropes in attacking Soros — meaning that Orban is fully part of the right-wing narrative that Soros is a Jew right-wingers are allowed to hate. Olohan didn’t explain why Hungarian media outlets are not allowed to criticize Orban — that should like the censorship that MRC purports to despise.
Olohan went on to whine that these Soros-funded outlets engage in forbidden thoughts — you know, free speech:
The Soros-backed Tilos Cultural Foundation, Magyar Hang, Debrecen, Nyugat Media and Atlatszo.hu Kozhasznu Nonprofit Kft. received State Department grants in the first and third rounds. And these publications do more damage than simply relentlessly going after Orban.
For example, Átlátszó works to undermine Hungary’s border security, going as far as blasting the government for focusing on defending the border against illegal immigration. In just one article, the publication cast blame on Hungarian border security for fights at the border and repeated a claim that people attempting to illegally enter the country “had given no indication that they had hostile intentions.”
The Soros-backed publication even reposted an article referring to radical gender ideology as a “phantom,” mocking attempts to protect Hungarian families.
In fact, “radical gender ideology” is not something that exists — meaning it really is a “phantom” — and those outlets actually pointed out that Hungarian authorities routinely beat and abused immigrants, which hardly qualifies as “defending the border.”
Why is Olohan supporting Orban’s censorship efforts here? We thought the MRC hated censorship.