Hungary’s National Media and Infocommunications Authority (NMHH) has raised concerns over the credibility of Freedom in the World, a global report by Freedom House that evaluates civil liberties and political rights in nearly 200 countries. In its recent assessment, NMHH criticized the report’s opaque methodology and questioned its evaluation of Hungary’s media environment.
According to NMHH, the report does not clearly identify the authors responsible for individual country assessments or the sources used to support its findings. Instead, it offers only a general list of contributors, from which it appears that just one Hungarian expert participated in the 2024 edition—casting doubt on the diversity of perspectives behind the report’s conclusions.
The authority also criticized the scoring system used to assess media independence, which is based on a narrow scale of zero to four. NMHH argues that such a limited range cannot adequately reflect the nuances of press freedom or the diversity between countries. For instance, Hungary reportedly received the same score as nations where journalists face physical violence, a comparison the authority called disproportionate and misleading.
In addition, NMHH noted that the report includes claims that appear in earlier editions and fall outside the official time frame of the 2024 evaluation period. Some of these statements, they said, are either factually incorrect or entirely unsupported.
Specifically, the report criticizes Hungary for a lack of media pluralism—a claim NMHH disputes. ‘The Hungarian media landscape is diverse, with numerous outlets representing differing viewpoints among key market players,’ the authority said.
NMHH regularly monitors international reports about Hungary’s media environment and found this latest edition from the US-based Freedom House to be lacking in transparency, methodological clarity, and objectivity.
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