Attila Mong/CPJ Guest Blogger
Attila Mong is a freelance journalist and CPJ’s Berlin-based Europe correspondent. He is a former John S. Knight Journalism Fellow and a Hoover Institution research fellow, both at Standford University. He was awarded the Pulitzer Memorial Prize for Best Investigative Journalism in 2004 and the Soma Investigative Journalism Prize in 2003.
New hurdles for Hungary’s press as Orbán restricts FOI requests
“This is the best thing that has ever happened in Hungary.” Katalin Erdélyi, a freedom of information activist, was referring to a ground-breaking website launched in Hungary in 2012. “I was glad because I realized the potential and how it will help me get all the information I longed for,” she told me. The website,…
Amid government crackdown, Hungary’s journalists look for new ways to work
“They raided our offices as if we were mobsters. The irony of the situation is that the Hungarian police rarely raid mobsters with such force,” said an employee at one of two NGOs whose Budapest offices were stormed by about 20 officers of the Central Investigations Office–Hungary’s version of the FBI–on September 8.
Hungary’s independent media struggle against economic pressure, intimidation
“This is a new wave of clampdowns by the government–they want to have another four-year term with even less critical media than before,” said Szabolcs, a 21-year-old economics student, one of thousands of people who marched in the streets of Budapest in June, chanting “Free Country, Free Press!” The demonstrations were in reaction to several…