The Media Research Center has long been fans of right-wing Hungarian leader Viktor Orban — to the point where it teamed up with an Orban-funded group to peddle that agenda. And in February, Clay Waters complained that “Monday’s PBS News Hour virtually skipped over Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s performance at the annual Munich Security Conference to wail over his subsequent trip to endorse ‘far-right prime minister’ Viktor Orban of Hungary.” He didn’t dispute the characterization beyond putting “far-right” in scare quotes.
So when Orban lost his bid for re-election, the MRC was a tad bitter that non-right-wing media celebrated it. Mark Finkelstein complained in an April 13 post:
On Monday’s Morning Joe, MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough used Hungary’s election results as an occasion to reprise a familiar habit: denigrating conservatives as ignorant and unserious.
Reacting to Viktor Orban’s defeat, Scarborough hailed it as a “great day for Western democracy” and a “very bad day” for those who have “done their best to try to destroy Western democracy.” He then pivoted to a broader swipe at critics of his preferred definition of “liberal democracy.”
“Liberal: a traditionally small-government term,” Scarborough insisted—before adding that “a lot of really stupid people don’t understand that, because they don’t read history. I guess they just scrawl in crayon books.” Liberal democracy = small government, Joe? If only!
[…]Calling the result “a tough day” for Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump—whom he said had backed Orban—Lemire added: “You never see an American administration back a foreign candidate like this.”
That’s a striking assertion—and flatly false.
During Israel’s 2015 election, operatives tied to the Barack Obama campaign apparatus worked with efforts aimed at defeating Netanyahu, including the V15 campaign. A bipartisan Senate investigation later found that an Obama State Department-funded group had helped build infrastructure that was subsequently used in that anti-Netanyahu effort.
In other words, the kind of involvement Lemire now treats as unprecedented.
In fact, a Senate subcommittee found that OneVoice — the group in question — fully complied with the terms of the original grant, no grant money was used in the election, the State Department placed no limitations on the post-grant use of those resources, and it has never been proven that the grant money was given with the ultimate goal of being used against Netanyahu. Funny that Finkelstein forgot to mention that part of the investigation. Still, he insisted on portraying this non-scandal as proof of “Democratic involvement in foreign elections.”
The next day, P.J. Gladnick groused:
Politico‘s senior executive editor, Alexander Burns, has a long history of attempting to foist far left politics upon the public. In his latest incarnation on Monday, Burns uses the defeat of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán at the polls to argue the Democrats need to embrace socialism if they want to defeat the nasty MAGA Republicans at the polls, “Orbán’s Defeat Shows What Trump’s Opponents Keep Doing Wrong.”
Gladnick refused to point out the right-wing ideology of Orban; instead, he huffed that “in Politico speak, “reformist candidates” always means far left candidates,” even though the candidate who defeated Orban, Peter Magyar, is a center-right politician, not “far left.”
Aside from passing mentions, that’s pretty much it for the MRC talking about Orban’s defeat. Gotta keep their Hungarian handlers happy.