There are some considerable errors is the article:
1)
“On Friday, a protest unaffiliated with any one political party accompanied a taxi strike in opposition to a 65% increase in gas prices. Together the protests blocked major routes through Budapest and the police came out in a show of force. It took several hours to get traffic back to normal.”
This is a serious misunderstanding of the events. The taxi strike happened during the first government at early 90′s. Nothing this sort was happening this year. What actually did happen is a bunch of people tried to sabbotage the city “in memory” of the taxi strike.
Not the same.
The fuel price did not increase 65% this year, to claim such is beyond reality.
“Hungary does enjoy a close trade relationship with Russia, and over the last year Hungary’s government has instated several austerity measures in an effort to rein in Hungary’s huge deficit.
Unfortunately the austerity measures bit just as last year’s scandal erupted. Among the least popular measures are a cut in public health care benefits and new tuition fees for university students.”
2)
Hungary’s trade with Russia declined to an all-time-low. Some right-wingers claim that Russian private investors are buying businesses in Hungary one after the other. This is another story, not much to do with trade. However, this claim is hard to prove since they use offshore companies for aquisitions making extremly hard to figure out who is behind these transactions.
3) Public health benefit cut simply did not happen in Hungary making it quite uneasy to be amongst the “least popular measures”. What actually did happen is a huge reorganization of the state owned public health infrastructure. Certainly this make some people’s life much harder, but a cut in health benefif would mean a totally different thing, i.e. for the same amount to pay for social security, less service is due. Nothing even close to this happened.
So bad other blogs are using all these claims for their analysis without any fact-checking, to name one: http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2007/11/those-pesky-east-europeans.html
Lastly it may well be a subjective perception only, but it seems to me too vague to put Magyar Nemzet and Nepszabadsag to the same disctance from good journalism. While it is true that both of them have much to do, Nepszabadsag sometimes meet the international accepted journalism, while Nemzet is more like a rasist rag then a political daily. Anyway in my Hungarian media critic blog I do not post on Nemzet articles since they do not meet my standards of journalism.
