Why Tucker’s trip to Hungary has sparked outrage

Aug 10, 2021 by

by Frank Furedi, spiked:

Western elites are terrified that their smear campaign against Hungary will unravel.

Why is the Western media so exercised about Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s trip to Hungary? Led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the mainstream American media have been outraged that Carlson decided to broadcast from Hungary last week, interviewing Orbán and generally sounding a positive note about the country and its government. Even BBC News carried a commentary piece with the title, ‘Tucker Carlson: What the Fox News host is doing in Hungary’.

At first sight, this extensive coverage devoted to denouncing Carlson for his trip, and in turn the Hungarian government, appears positively bizarre. The title of an article published by Insider protests that ‘Tucker Carlson did PR for Hungary’s authoritarian leader, presenting the country as “freer” than the US’. Adopting a tone of outrage, the author of the article is at a loss to understand how anyone could have anything good to say about the government of Viktor Orbán.

[…]  For the first time in recent years, a representative of a major media organisation has bucked the trend. In effect, Carlson’s broadcasts from Hungary threaten to undermine the cordon sanitaire around the country that has been carefully constructed as a problem by globalist NGOs and media organisations.

Amid all the outrage this past week there was a palpable sense of terror that ordinary Americans might actually agree with some of Orbán’s views. As a piece in the New York Times put it, ‘For Mr Carlson, the Hungary trip was an opportunity to put Mr Orbán, whom he admires, on the map for his viewers back home, a conservative audience that may be open to the sort of illiberalism promoted by the Hungarian leader. On Wednesday’s show, Mr Carlson praised Hungary as a “small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us”.’

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Read also: Why Liberals Hate Hungary’s Viktor Orban So Much by Sumantra Maitra, The Federalist

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