28
However, dissatisfied with the activity of the new presidents, in summer 1991 the
conservative government decided to use a 1974 decree on Hungarian Television that
placed MTV
under government supervision.
7
This is sometimes considered the formal
starting point of the long-lasting "media war" that featured legal battles, parliamentary
hearings, street demonstrations, and numerous politically motivated sackings in the
public media. In the standard interpretation, the 1990-94 government repeatedly tried to
(A) replace the presidents of the two electronic media with their cronies; (B) impose the
1974 decree on governmental supervision of the MTV
by introducing an operative control
over the media; (C) stop the independent functioning of public radio and television by
depriving them of the budgetary resources needed for their functioning; and (D) pass a
media law favorable to their goals without securing the prescribed 2/3 majority for it in
parliament (cf. Arato 1996: 226).
It is hard to judge the validity of the widely divergent claims about how much
attention the general public devoted to the media war, and which side found more favor
with them on the bewildering number of smaller and bigger issues that divided the
feuding sides. But certainly in the parliament and the press there was vocal opposition to
the government’s media policy. The battle became particularly visible as the President of
the Republic repeatedly refused to sign the removal of the Presidents of the Radio and TV
and to accept the logic of the government regarding media supervision. The
parliamentary opposition appealed to the Constitutional Court against the governments'
use of the 1974 decree, and prevented the governmental majority from passing media
legislation through parliament. Larger or smaller street demonstrations took place
ostensibly in support of the freedom of the press and against what was described as the
authoritarian and right-wing extremist tendencies in the government parties. Meanwhile
public media came to be run by the vice-presidents loyal to the government, and the tone
broadcast from a moving location at irregular intervals only in order to invite the police
for a catch-me-if-you-can game.
7
Later on, during the media war, the Constitutional Court found this decree
unconstitutional, but postponed its nullification until the new media law passed. The
court based this decision on the argument that it is better to have unconstitutional
governmental supervision than not to have any supervision at all (Halmai: 220, refers to
the Decision of the Constitutional Court No. 37/1992).
Convention