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2.) The procedure for appointing the Head of the Radio and Television Office

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Abstract

I chose the change of regime within the Hungarian electronic media system as the topic of my doctoral dissertation, which was not only a significant point of contention in the first two parliamentary terms in the 1990s, but faithfully reflected the basic fault lines in Hungarian politics immediately after the first elections.

As the dissertation is written within the framework of doctoral studies in political science and law, it naturally focuses on the examination of the draft bills and then the adopted Media Act, but of course it also monitors the political narrative of the topic, as I am a political scientist.

Since 2013, I have been engaged in system change research within the framework of the Research Institute and Archives for the History of Regime Change. I have written a number of books and studies1, but so far I have mainly dealt with the integration of Central and Eastern European countries into the European Union and the history research of Hungarian political parties, so the field of media is new to me.

I accepted the writing of the history of Act I of 1996 according to a specific theme at the invitation of Professor Tamás Mihály Révész, and using my research experience so far, I processed the minutes of the parliamentary committee and plenary sessions already researched according to a system that has not been examined so far. The research was limited to six issues along which the protocols were processed:

1.) The issue of the legal form and financial independence of Hungarian Television and Hungarian Radio;

2.) The procedure for appointing the Head of the Radio and Television Office;

3.) Debate on the level of foreign capital involvement, antitrust measures and content quotas;

4.) The issue of financing the Office of Radio and Television and the problem of conflicts of interest;

1 Fricz Tamás – Orosz Tímea: Küzdelmes integráció 2004-2009, L’Harmattan Kiadó, Budapest, 2011;

Rendszerváltás 1989, felelős szerkesztő: M. Kiss Sándor, Antológia Kiadó, Lakitelek, 2014; Fricz Tamás – Halmy Kund – Orosz Tímea: A politikai túlélés művészete – Az MSZMP/MSZP hatalomátmentésének természetrajza:

érvelés és gyakorlat (1988–2010), Antológia Kiadó, Lakitelek, 2014; Orosz Tímea: A magyar szociáldemokrácia a rendszerváltás idején, Antológia Kiadó, Lakitelek, 2017; Fricz Tamás – Halmy Kund – Orosz Tímea: Az SZDSZ- jelenség – Liberalizmus Magyarországon a rendszerváltás idején, Antológia Kiadó, Lakitelek, 2018.

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5.) The protection of cultural values and the issue of content quotas.

The dissertation is mainly based on the processing of the minutes of the parliamentary committees and the plenary sittings involved in the drafting of the bill and the six-party negotiations, but it cannot be without the processing of the materials of the ministerial committees and the proposals discussed before these committees. The voluminous press material on the topic helped understand the connections, the most relevant part of which I also mentioned in the footnotes.

A fundamental problem is that the Library of Parliament, the Hungarian National Archives and the individual ministries only have the minutes of the committee meetings themselves, but the proposals and drafts discussed there are not attached to the minutes. A significant part of these was not preserved at all in the archives, so they could only be obtained from private collections or not even from there following a long search.

An additional difficulty is that some of the pages around 1990 were printed with an electronic typewriter or inkjet printer so they are no longer legible due to toner wear and tear. Since the materials are available in scanned form on the Internet, and I worked primarily from that, I trusted that by retrieving the originals from the library I would get ahead and they are possibly better readable than the digitized version, but unfortunately that did not work. Significant passages of text cannot be processed for this reason. It is particularly unfortunate, for example, that Miklós Haraszti's summary of the foreign capital ratio is illegible as well, which essentially includes the SZDSZ's political position on the whole media policy issue, and this would be very important for my research.

During the presentation of each debate, the main goal was to outline the differences and contradictions between the government and the opposition, for me, in addition to the legal aspects, the political narratives of the birth of the act and the political lines, interests and counter- interests that play an extraordinary role are at least as important. .

I did not try to outline the chronology of the events because we have a library of literature and press material about it. However, in addition to the relevant literature on the topic, I could mostly rely only on the protocols in the five topics defined in the introduction, because I did not find specific publications in them even with the help of the legal experts of the Information Service of the Library of Parliament.

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In addition to processing these, I got acquainted with the work of researchers having dealt with the topic before, focusing on the work of András Koltay, an expert in the field, Tamás Klein, Gergely Gosztonyi, György Domokos Varga and Sándor Révész, who approached the events of the Hungarian regime change related to mass communication in other fields and in different aspects, so that their work can form the primary literature sources of the present dissertation.

In the course of the research, it is very important for me to examine what the position of the so- called successor party of the MSZMP during the “media war” was and how the positions and resolutions of the historical and emerging parties were settled on the issue. Nor is it uninteresting to study the fundamental differences between the various bills submitted under the Antall government and the Horn government, and the extent to which the deep ideological divide between the respective governing parties was revealed.

It is important to monitor how the position of each party on the issue of the Media Act changed depending on whether they sat on the government side or in opposition to the negotiating table, and how the position of smaller opposition parties and the SZDSZ, which underwent a major political turnaround, altered as the role of SZDSZ politicians and their hard-to-overestimate impact on the process of drafting the law and the evolution of political battles is difficult to dispute.

An important undertaking of the research was to examine the nature of the media system that developed in Hungary after 1990 and the impact of the activities of the Constitutional Court, although the dissertation focuses primarily on the development of national public service radio and television conditions.

The thesis pays special attention to the concept of public service, which was finally created only by Act I of 1996, although the issue also concerned the creators of previous bills.

Through the presentation of the literature on the topic, the paper establishes that public service is, on the one hand, political and state influence and control, and, on the other hand, a system of ideas and values that has specific social functions and cultural roles.2 Certain principles of the public service radio and television program service can be defined along its values. These include unrestricted access and geographical coverage for society, meeting basic needs, diversity

2 Terestyéni Tamás: A közszolgálatiság követelményeinek értelmezése, különös tekintettel a médiatörvény előírásaira, Jel-Kép 1997/2, p. 91–92.

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of services, respect for minorities, guarding European and national culture, language and identity, meeting high professional standards3, and of course last but not least, compliance with the requirements of a democratic political system as regards the right to balanced information and orientation and objectivity and objectivity. 4

The era of technological innovations in the 1980s created significantly cheaper and more efficient means of electronic broadcasting, which resulted in a mushrooming of various media companies and their market and profit orientation was to meet mass demands. As a result, the idea of public service was not only pushed into the background, but by the turn of the millennium it was essentially questioned, leading to several political and professional debates. 5 In my view, however, the service of the public interest is of transcendent significance and cannot be compared with satisfying business interests, since the public interest is always of higher priority than the interests of the individual or a narrow business group.

3 Gosztonyi Gergely (2003), p. 3.; Koltay András – Nyakas Levente: Magyar és európai médiajog, CompLex, 2012., p. 246., 264.; Koltay András (2007a).

4 McQuail, Denis: A tömegkommunikáció elmélete, Osiris, Budapest 2003, p. 142.; Jakab Zoltán: A közszolgálatiság értelmezése a 20-as évektől napjainkig, in: Terestyéni Tamás (szerk.): Közszolgálatiság a médiában. Ábránd vagy realitás? Osiris, Budapest, 1995, p. 58.; Gosztonyi Gergely (2003), p. 3–4.; Koltay András – Nyakas Levente (szerk.) (2012), p. 245., 260.; Terestyéni Tamás (1997), p. 92–93.

5 Antal Zsolt (2011), p. 151.

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