"Hungary’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade summoned David Kostelancik, charge d'affaires at the US Embassy in Budapest, after the US State Department launched a media fund for rural media outlets in Hungary, RTL Klub reported.
The 700.000 USD program’s “goal is to support media outlets operating
outside the capital in Hungary to produce fact-based reporting and
increase their audience and economic sustainability.The program should increase citizens’ access to objective information about domestic and global issues of public importance, by enhancing local media’s ability to engage a larger audience, including their print, multimedia, and online readership”, according to the State Department’s recent announcement.
The ministry told RTL Klub that Kostelancik was summoned to give explanation. With the upcoming elections in 2018, the Hungarian government considers the State Department’s announcement as “intervention into Hungarian domestic politics”.
Group leader of the ruling Fidesz party, Gergely Gulyas was asked about the State Department’s plans to support the media in the Hungarian provinces. He said that it was “an attempt to interfere with Hungary’s affairs” and added that similar foreign attempts would not be tolerated by the US political elite, no matter where the money comes from.
Kostelancik was summoned to the ministry in October, following his remarks about the “worrying” state of press freedoms in Hungary."
Image above from Hungary Journal
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Second source: Politico
"Hungary notes US State Dept. is still filled with Obama holdovers, adding "we trust that this will change."...“Several tens of thousands of people work in the State Department, a great deal of whom are holdovers from the Obama administration."
11/16/2017, "Hungary accuses US of meddling in election. Backlash against State Department for planning to fund media projects," Politico, Lili Bayer, Budapest
"The Hungarian government on Thursday accused the U.S. State Department of interfering in the country’s election campaign.
The Hungarian Foreign Ministry summoned the top American diplomat in Budapest, chargé d’affaires David Kostelancik, after the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) announced on November 7 that it would provide up to $700,000 “for projects that increase citizens’ access to objective information about domestic and global issues in Hungary.”
“DRL’s goal is to support media outlets operating outside the capital in Hungary to produce fact-based reporting and increase their audience and economic sustainability,” the State Department wrote on its website....
The Hungarian government, which is a vocal supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, has repeatedly claimed that State Department policies do not represent the White House’s views.
“Several tens of thousands of people work in the State Department, a great deal of whom are holdovers from the Obama administration,” said László Szabó, Hungary’s ambassador to the U.S., in an interview with Hungarian state agency MTI in August.
“We trust that this will change and we’ll have more and more friends in the State Department too,” he said."...
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Third source: Breitbart:
Hungary's Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy also took the US "Charge d'Affaires to task for praising journalists of the “Communist old guard” who attended his speech for supposedly “striving to speak the truth”."
11/22/2017, "U.S. State Dept Puts $700,000 into Hungarian Media, Demands ‘Programming’ Against Orban, Patriots," Breitbart, Jack Montgomery
Third source: Breitbart:
Hungary's Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy also took the US "Charge d'Affaires to task for praising journalists of the “Communist old guard” who attended his speech for supposedly “striving to speak the truth”."
11/22/2017, "U.S. State Dept Puts $700,000 into Hungarian Media, Demands ‘Programming’ Against Orban, Patriots," Breitbart, Jack Montgomery
"The U.S. State Department has courted controversy by announcing it will plough $700,000 into Hungarian media, angering the country’s anti-globalist, conservative government.
The funding was announced by U.S. Chargé d‘Affaires David Kostelancik, who has previously appeared to openly criticise the Trump administration by alluding to “apparent inconsistencies in [U.S.] foreign policy” and remarking that “not every criticism of the government is ‘fake news’.”
Breitbart London spoke to a State Department official who confirmed it supports what it calls “democracy and human rights programming” in many countries, and that its intentions in Hungary — a NATO ally — are to “support media outlets operating outside the capital … to produce fact-based reporting and increase their audience and economic sustainability”.
The State Department also echoed Kostelancik’s claim that too many Hungarian news outlets are sympathetic to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s popular conservative government — which has earned powerful enemies by opposing the European Union on mass migration, building a highly effective border wall, and exposing the network of European politicians deemed “reliable allies” by billionaire open borders campaigner George Soros.
The obvious subtext to all of this is that the State Department [US taxpayer] funding effort is intended to bolster anti-government and opposition media. This suggests it is still pursuing Obama era, anti-conservative policy objectives internationally in defiance of President Trump, who has praised Prime Minister Orbán — the first European leader to back him — as “strong and brave”.
The Hungarian leader has maintained a position of strong opposition to “globalist elites, the bureaucrats who serve them, the politicians in their pay, and the agents of the Soros-type networks that embody their interests” despite fierce opposition from Brussels, pro-mass immigration NGOs, and left-liberal U.S. media, believing he is standing up for a “silent majority” of hard-pressed families across the West, who wish to preserve their Christian heritage and national identity.
For its part, the Hungarian government has denounced the State Department for what it regards as blatant interference in its internal affairs ahead of national elections in Spring 2018.
“What is this if not an intervention in the election campaign and the domestic politics of Hungary? Which Washington office can judge the applications of media organisations from a Hungarian county and what kind of balanced service they would like to offer?” asked Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó, who said it was shocking that American taxpayers’ money was being used to — to quote the State Department — “educate journalists on how to practice their trade” in an allied democracy.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has summoned the U.S. Chargé d‘Affaires, asking for an explanation, and told him that we consider this a political intervention by the U.S. Department of State ahead of the elections,” a spokesman added.
The Hungarians have also robustly rejected the State Department’s accusations that there is no press freedom in their country....
Dr. Kovács [Prime Minister Orbán’s Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy] then questioned whether Kostelancik--who is not the U.S. ambassador to Hungary, but only fulfilling that role temporarily while the Obama appointee he formerly served is in the process of being replaced — has any mandate to be attacking Hungary’s media landscape in the first place.
He also took the Chargé d‘Affaires to task for praising journalists of the “Communist old guard” who attended his speech for supposedly “striving to speak the truth” — a scene the Hungarian described as “stomach-turning”, given their history of collaboration with the Soviet-backed dictatorship.
Prime Minister Orbán, who opposed the Leftist regime at some personal risk as a younger man, has often chided Western leaders — and the European Union in particular — of “making excuses for the crimes of Communism”, and worked to make sure its victims are given due attention since his election.
Dr Kovács went on the publish a more extensive response to Kostelancik and the State Department, in which he lamented their actions as “astonishing and disappointing coming from an ally”.
Beyond the “clear interference in the domestic affairs of an ally”, he noted that “the media in the U.S. has its own issues. Criticisms related to concentration of media ownership, commercial relationships, and mainstream media bias – Harvey Weinstein, anyone? — are now the stuff of everyday in the U.S.”
He concluded by observing that one of George Soros’s many so-called civil society organisations launched a media training operation in Hungary around the same time as Kostalencik announced the State Department funding scheme— leaving some suspicious as to who the “partner” the State Department intends to select to deliver its programme might turn out to be....
“Let’s speak to the point. Migration is not the goal of the Soros Plan, but merely its means,” Prime Minister Orbán observed in a November 12th speech.
“Millions of people in Africa and the Middle East are being encouraged to come to Europe; indeed they are even being transported here, in order to debilitate nations and deliver the coup de grâce to Christian culture.”
The Hungarian premier believes that this process of undermining nation-states, revealed as a globalist imperative by United Nations migration chief Peter Sutherland in 2012, ["EU should "do its best to undermine" the "homogeneity" of its member states, the UN's special representative for migration has said."] forms part of a wider plan by EU elites “to replace an alliance of nations with a federation of states” — a United States of Europe.
“This is the only logical explanation for millions of people being transported to Europe from other cultures – as there must be some sort of explanation for why this is happening now. We cannot consider this to be an accident,” he added.
“Europe could defend its borders if it wanted to … what is lacking is not the ability to do so, but the will. And this lack of will is not unintentional, but the consequence of a definite underlying attitude that, in a United States of Europe, nations and their Christian character are more of a drawback than a benefit.”"
Among comments at Breitbart:
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- We sit helplessly as laws are selectively enforced against us to stifle our wishes and undermine our political will. All over the world. Even the people we elect let it happen.
This is a complete misappropriation of taxpayer funds. This is the kind of stuff that will sink Trump. Like he has all these rogue agencies blatantly defying him and he apparently has no interest in stopping them or whipping them into shape. Why continue to support a castrated, ineffectual leader that refuses to crack down on this insurrection by his own underlings?
Even if Hungarian media is too slanted in one direction, since when is that the business of the State Department? I say the US media is too slanted in favour of Hillary, Democrats and far-let beliefs - are you going to give more money to FOX NEWS and Breitbart in the interest of balance?
Would it be okay if a foreign government (like Russia) gave them money, like say $700,000? No? That would be collusion. right?"...
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This outrageous misappropriation of taxpayer funds is yet another indication that the "deep state", that being the left overs from the [Obama] O'Douchebag administration remain entrenched in the government even to a level that they dare operate overtly in stark contrast to the presidents policies. It's been nearly a year and they have yet to be ferreted out and summarily dismissed. Their continued presence and ability to circumvent the president, and even the congress which appropriates the funds is a glaring example of the ineffectiveness of the president's advisor's and his unwillingness to do the right thing. I'm at my wits end with this garbage, Are you?"
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The State Department is a rogue sub-government. Other than the EPA, it's probably the worst of the Deep State. Trump should fire them all and start over. We would be better off WITHOUT a State Department at all."
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