What Democracy Looks Like

Free Press: A Hungarian Perspective

By Amy Brouillette, 7-14-05

As the quake of Judith Miller’s recent jailing rattles through American newsrooms, reporters here—and everywhere—are left wondering just how free is our free press. Offering an international perspective on the issue, Hungarian media-law expert and visiting scholar at University of Colorado, Dr. Peter Molnar, spoke to a small group at the Denver Press Club Tuesday.

Molnar comes with impressive credentials: In the late 80s, he was one of Hungary’s young and rebellious opposition leaders, an intellectual-turned-activist-turned-politician who served eight years in Hungary’s Parliament after communism’s collapse in 1989. A year earlier, Molnar and a group fellow law student grads in Budapest had formed a liberal student opposition party (a risky endeavor then) so popular it won 22 seats when Hungary held its free elections in 1990. At age 24, he took a seat in parliament as Minister of Culture and Media. His monumental task: to codify the free press ideal, the central tenant of democracy, into law—often looking West, and to America’s First Amendment, as the gold standard.

“When you hear about American journalists going to jail it makes me wonder whether America is no longer the beacon it once was,� Molnar said Tuesday. Not since communism’s demise has any Hungarian journalist sat in jail. In Hungary and all over post-communist Europe, the idea of packing journalists off to prison strikes a deep, painful chord of a not-too-distant times under Soviet rule. A free press—unshackling journalists, literally, from state grip—was the foundation and fuel of the democratic movement that swept communist-bloc Europe.

Miller’s jailing comes at an especially tricky time in American politics, too, when Bush and co. are furiously trumpeting democracy around the globe. Since 9/11, America’s press freedoms have come under siege. According to an April study by Freedom House, a non-partisan group that gauges press freedom across the globe, a slew of recent legal cases here demanding journalists reveal their sources or turn over their notes marks a decline in America’s free-press standing—not just perceived in the eyes of world, but actually in practice on the ground. This latest incursion is a most extreme example.

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