“It’s a simple reality: people working in the media are in the vast majority left-liberal. This is due to what we could call ‘selection bias’” said Andrej Nosko – who was until 2018 one of the directors and head of division for the Open Society Foundations funded by George Soros and who as such is well-acquainted, from within, with the practices of politics, the international press and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) significantly distorting reality – describing the present situation of the international press.
The person conducting the Skype interview with Mr Nosko whom we were unable to identify asked: Does this kind of bias in the media – meaning that Hungary or Romania receives different degrees of attention, for instance – come from the parties themselves?
According to the former director of the Soros Foundations, the answer to this question is clearly ‘yes’. “This is normal tribal or herd behaviour. They all come from the same group, and won’t criticise their own,” Mr Nosko said.
He took the view that if the Hungarian prime minister were a socialist, both the media and the European Union would treat him differently.
He mentioned as an example the premiership and approval rating of Slovakia’s Robert Fico, adding that investigative journalist Ján Kuciak was assassinated during his premiership. “Fico did far worse things than the Hungarian prime minister,” he observed. Mr Nosko also spoke about the time when a Slovak politician criticised the Hungarian media legislation. “I was entertained – perverse entertainment, I’m sorry to say that – when media freedom was criticised by an MP of Slovakia Monika Benová who is there for the socialist party and who voted for laws there were significantly more restrictive in Slovakia. She has the audacity to criticise a media law that was not half as restrictive as the media law that her party at home in Slovakia (voted for),” the former head of the Soros Foundations stated.
Mr Nosko mentioned as his favourite example that “Slovakia’s Robert Fico and Romania’s Victor Ponta were the socialists who were the loudest critics of Viktor Orbán, but when they would have had good reason to criticise their own, they remained silent”.