Klubrádió news release

The President of the Media Council issued an announcement via one of its subordinates, MTI (Hungarian News Agency).

This document hardly contains any statements resembling the truth.

She says that the Media Council did not take away the frequency from Klubrádió. In reality, it did not take it away, rather unlawfully and in a discriminatory manner the Council did not allow Klubrádió to continue using it, while other programme providers were granted another seven years of opportunity to broadcast.

She says that the agency had no latitude (related to renewing the frequency) when making its decisions. It did; because, for example, in case of Inforádió, it decided the other way, despite the same preceding events.

Again, she is not telling the truth when she speaks about applying the same measure, free of discrimination. Klubrádió actually documented the discriminative decisions made by the Media Council by which positive decisions were made not only for Inforádió but also for other service providers with the same history, when judging the request for renewal of their contract. Discrimination is not excused by the fact that not only Klubrádió suffered negative discrimination.

As the head of the Media Council consisting of only government party members she distorts the truth when she attempts to substantiate the deprivation of rights affecting hundreds of thousands by citing repeated “infringements of the law”: Klubrádió was late twice within a year uploading its report on complying with weekly programme quotas to the server of the authority. That is, it did not fail to do so, as Ms. Karas put it, but even according to the Media Council, it was only late with it! But was it really late with it? At the time in question there was no legally defined deadline to comply with the obligation to provide data; therefore it could not be missed! And the data were uploaded.

Again, the head of the Media Council strongly distorts the truth with her following remark: "if Klubrádió had not filed a request for renewal for legally exclusive reasons, is such a case the Media Council could have completed the tendering procedure by the time the service providing licence expired, meaning 14 February, and Klubrádió could have had a good chance in taking part". This is not true either. The two issues run parallel: the Media Council could have issued a call for tenders earlier, and its current status is caused by the legal remedy of the disqualified applicants and not by the legal battle fought by Klubrádió for the renewal of the frequency.

Ms. Karas also cites the continuous motion on the radio market and the “limited state resources” regarding available radio frequencies. In this case, why are there several dozens of unused frequencies lying idle for long years, including Klubrádió’s former 95.3 MHz frequency unused since 2014?

The next distortion of the President of the Media Council is when she says that Klubrádió was able to broadcast free of charge on community frequency for ten, not seven years. But she does not add that the opportunity for service providing and keeping the frequency was not the outcome of the activities of the Media Council, but was the consequence of binding court rulings on the series of infringements of the Media Council between 2010 and 2013.

Finally, Ms. Karas says that Klubrádió still has a chance to be on air in case of a successful tender, but then right after this, she symbolically pulled the plug out of the transmitting equipment.

But only one half of it!

Klubrádió