4 Apr 2025 | Americas, Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, News and features, United States
When Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán delivered his annual state of the nation speech in February, he declared the Trump administration was an inspiration.
But if you look at Orbán’s record you can see that the Hungarian prime minister could actually be the inspiration for Donald Trump’s recent manoeuvres. Orbán was bullying universities, threatening the free press and raging against LGBTQ+ rights way before the second Trump administration started taking aim at those things.
Orbán sees Trump as a “comrade-in-arm[s]” and well he might, as the Trump plan has plenty of resonance with what the Hungarian leader enacted after his second election win in 2010. If Trump had been studying what Orbán had achieved and jotted down notes, he could easily be following the same tick box list of opponents.
Take note of the similarities in language. Orbán talks of: “Pseudo-NGOs, bought journalists, judges, prosecutors, politicians, foundations, bureaucrats – an entire machine that operates the liberal opinion dictatorship and political oppression in the Western world”. This sounds awfully like a Trump speech.
But here’s the thing; Orbán was way ahead of Trump 2.0 in closing down cash flows to universities, which he saw as breeding grounds for opinions he didn’t like.
In 2021, Orbán massively overhauled the way Hungary’s universities were run. A new law meant that 11 universities passed out of state hands and became foundations instead with supervisory boards of politically like-minded people, excluding anyone with “internalist” or “globalist” views, the prime minister said. Several members of the government at the time were installed on these boards including foreign minister Peter Szijjarto. Opposition figures accused Orbán’s government of wanting to control what was taught and researched. “They want ideological control over the universities,” Jozsef Palinkas, a former member of Orbán’s Fidesz party and president of the Academy of Sciences told the German news outlet Deutsche Welle at the time.
The highly ranked Central European University had already been forced to move its main campus out of Hungary and relocate to Austria in 2019, because of the Orbán government’s continuous attacks on it and its founder, the Hungarian-born, US-based George Soros.
Does this all sound familiar? Trump is in the first round of a bloody battle with US universities, demanding removal of diversity programmes, crackdowns on student protests, and possible changes to the syllabus.
Already this is bearing fruit. The University of California has agreed to drop a policy where new staff had to fill in a statement about how they would contribute to diversity on campus. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has cut $400 million in research grants from Columbia University. Trump’s team are linking the cuts to criticism that the institution had not done enough to crack down on antisemitism by allowing pro-Gaza protests. Fearful of what might happen next, Columbia has caved to Trump’s threats and has already agreed to give its campus police more power to arrest student protesters and to replace those running its Middle Eastern studies department.
While there were rumblings about the “liberal elite” running US universities during Trump 1.0, these vague threats mostly came to nothing. This time, though, the attack on the university sector is wholehearted. It partly stems from a belief of Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) Republicans that universities and any critical media are part of a bastion of oppression for those with right-wing values. Such a deep and dangerous attack on US universities and their academic freedom via their research funding has never been attempted with this vigour.
Back in 2021, now vice-president J.D. Vance gave plenty of warning about what might happen next, when he outlined why the Republicans had to take action against “hostile institutions” who control “what we call truth”. Vance said: “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country … we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” That’s clearly what’s happening now.
Amelia Hadfield, head of the department of politics at Surrey University in the UK, said: “Trump is following a long-established autocratic playbook. Dictatorial heads of state including Orbán have for years provided a populist-led model based on a sharp ideological tilt to the right, filleting their state’s reach in terms of social, welfare, and humanitarian and international support whilst repressing anything resembling open debate, let alone criticism.”
Trump has continued his swivel against the liberal media that he began in his first term. He expects uncritical support, otherwise – as The Associated Press (AP) has already experienced – your access to the White House will be removed. Again Orbán had reached this point earlier on, with a plan to get rid of critical media that might get in his way.
While Orbán set the groundwork for creating a pro-rightwing media sphere in Hungary during his first term, the hard work really began when he returned to office in 2010. Orbán set out, with a little help from his friends, to force out, close down or neutralise unfriendly media outlets. International media conglomerates such as Axel Springer sold up and moved out as foreign news outlets were vilified, and government advertising contracts were removed from those that didn’t publish pro-Orbán editorials. Meanwhile, wealthy allies of Orbán bought out significant national and regional media. Suddenly it was possible to find all the same stories with the same angles and headlines in news sources across Hungary, all run by Orbán’s friends.
Orbán and Trump have an awful lot else in common including tough migration programmes and a warm relationship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But Trump is moving a lot faster than Orbán did and for those trying to fight back against Trump’s plans to erode media and academic freedoms, one thing they might want at the forefront of their minds is that Orbán has now been in power continuously for 15 years. This is something that Trump might well put on his to-do list, if he can work out how to achieve it.
17 Mar 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
Index on Censorship has much in common with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. We were all established during the Cold War, us in 1972 and RFE and RL in 1950 and 1953 respectively. We were all designed to offer uncensored news and alternative viewpoints to countries behind the Iron Curtain. And we all went beyond the Cold War remit both geographically and chronologically. Index never just covered the USSR, while the Radio Free brand later expanded into newsrooms operating across the globe; none of us closed shop in 1991.
Our shared central mission – to cover oppression whenever it manifested and to centre the voices of those who would otherwise be silenced – has not always been easy or free from controversy. But the attacks never felt existential. Until Donald Trump’s administration.
Building on threats already made to close RFE/RL and Voice of America, which we reported about here, on 14 March the White House issued an Executive Order aimed at “[r]educing the Scope of the Federal Bureaucracy”. Among the agencies impacted was USAGM, which funds RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia and VOA. On 15 March, RFE/RL was notified by the USAGM that its federal grant agreement, which funds its global operations, has been terminated. RFA was similarly notified by USAGM special adviser Kari Lake that its grant had been terminated and that the organisation must “promptly refund any unobligated funds”. The director of VOA, Michael Abramowitz, confirmed that “virtually the entire staff of Voice of America—more than 1300 journalists, producers and support staff—has been placed on administrative leave” as well.
These attacks feel as personal to us as they are political.
The White House published a news article focused on VOA, highlighting the importance of the funding cuts to “ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”.
The idea that they are “radical propaganda” is rubbish, more double speak from an administration that will argue left means right. The Radio Free outlets and VOA, all of whom are editorially independent from the US government, run huge newsrooms staffed by people trained to the highest standards. They have played a vital role in the global media environment, with their journalists taking great risks to operate in countries that have severely curtailed media freedom, such as Belarus, Myanmar, China, North Korea and Russia.
Abramowitz said VOA provides “objective and balanced news and information, especially for those living under tyranny”, while RFA President and CEO Bay Fang has described the move as “a reward to dictators and despots” and one that “benefits America’s adversaries at our own expense”. Renew Europe, a group of European MEPs, warned that these cuts could “leave a void that could be exploited by authoritarian regimes seeking to suppress free speech and control narratives.” We can only agree. Several autocrats have already welcomed the move.
The decision comes as the USAID funding freeze has already endangered public-interest journalism, particularly in Ukraine, where it has supported coverage of Russia’s unlawful invasion and the actions of the Ukrainian government. As Kyiv Independent’s editor Olga Rudenko highlighted, the sudden funding cuts have forced some Ukrainian outlets to slash their budgets by 90%. This crisis extends beyond Ukraine, threatening the entire global media landscape.
So here is our message to all of those who have been impacted: we stand firmly in solidarity with you. In today’s world, where lies are cheap, the brand of journalism that RFE/RL and others champion is not a luxury – it is an essential tool to safeguard democratic accountability. There is a reason these brands outlived the Cold War. It’s now up to all of us to help see them through the Trump years.
24 Feb 2025 | About Index, Americas, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Newsletters, Russia, Ukraine, United States
The news this week has been dominated by the growing feud between Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which has culminated in possibly irreparable relations between the presidents.
What started with a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine (from which Zelenskyy was excluded) ended in a stream of disinformation coming from the leader of the world’s largest economy. Trump made several spurious claims chiming with those regularly churned out by Putin’s propaganda machine.
Among these were that Zelenskyy is a “dictator without elections”, that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s 2022 invasion, and that Zelenskyy’s approval rating in Ukraine has plummeted to 4%, all of which closely mirror the Kremlin’s narrative. In response, Zelenskyy said that the US president is “trapped” within a Russian “disinformation bubble”.
Trump’s comments have been debunked by many world leaders, including Keir Starmer, who immediately came out in support of Zelenskyy as a democratically elected leader, and asserted that it is normal for presidential elections to be suspended during wartime (as happened in the UK during World War Two).
This exchange indicates a drastic reshaping in the geopolitical relationship between the USA and Russia, and indeed the USA and its key allies – but it also indicates a worrying affront to access to truthful information, the normalisation of false realities, and an acceptance of the suppression of free speech.
In what is often deemed Putin’s “war on truth”, the autocratic leader’s regime is notorious for crackdowns on journalism and free information. As well as blocking access to almost all social media websites and international news sites in Russia, his government has banned independent news outlets, with media now under government control. In doing so, he has been able to control the narrative of the war for his own citizens.
This is not to say that Ukraine itself has been a bastion of free expression. As reported by Amnesty International, free speech restrictions in the country have increased since 2022, with 2,000 cases of individuals being charged, prosecuted or investigated for crimes such as “justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine”, including those who class themselves as pacifists.
But what Trump’s words do signal is a terrifying new world order where intentional mistruths are prioritised over fair, free and accurate information, not only by dictators, but by leaders who are meant to be upholding the principles of democracy.
Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, former US president Barack Obama delivered a speech at Stanford University about the growing propagation of disinformation, and how it could endanger democracy. Autocratic leaders, such as Putin, have weaponised the power of the internet to obfuscate the truth and confuse the global public, he said. “You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe.”
Three years later, and we’re seeing this play out in real time, with the help of the current president of the USA. The sewage is spilling across the world, muddying the waters, and it will have global ramifications on what people believe to be undisputed fact.
18 Feb 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
In the blizzard of announcements, statements and threats made by President Donald Trump’s administration over the past few weeks, those concerning public broadcasters should have a particular resonance for readers of Index on Censorship.
On 9 February, Richard Grenell, the U.S. presidential envoy for special missions, wrote on X that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America are “state-owned media” and “are a relic of the past.”
The billionaire Elon Musk, appointed by Trump to oversee the new advisory body, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), agreed: “Yes, shut them down. Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy). Nobody listens to them anymore. It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”
These Cold War institutions have been symbolic of American soft power since their inception. Each, in its way, was designed to counter authoritarian propaganda: Voice of America was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi ideology and Radio Free Europe in 1950 as a response to the Soviet equivalent. Radio Liberty had the specific task of broadcasting inside Russia.
These barely-veiled threats to foreign-facing broadcasters mirror similar announcements on the defunding of American broadcasters, including National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). DOGE subcommittee chair Majorie Taylor Greene has called on executives from the two organisations to give evidence to DOGE, which has accused them of “systemically biased news coverage”.
This may seem like small beer compared to the geopolitical earthquake represented by the US administration’s proclamations on the Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict, or its sabre-rattling on Greenland or Canada. But these moves are part of the same epochal shift in American foreign policy. There is much to criticise about America’s record in the post-war period. But even the worst abuses were driven, at least rhetorically, by an opposition to authoritarianism. It is no exaggeration to say that Trump and Musk are now increasingly aligned with the authoritarian heir to Stalin in the shape of Vladimir Putin, and the heirs of Hitler in the AfD (Alternative for Germany).
The irony of Musk categorising Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America as the “radical left” will not be lost on those of the European left who traditionally saw these outlets as the ideological wing of the American government or even the CIA. Indeed, they are often credited with playing a key role in providing the propaganda underpinnings that led to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.
Index has always felt a close affinity with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty due to its origins fighting for dissidents in the former Soviet Union. The role of these twin broadcasters took on a renewed significance after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, something we covered in summer 2022. At the time Patrick Boehler, head of digital strategy for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty told me: “We have 23 news rooms. They are in Afghanistan and Pakistan, up to Hungary… We have fantastic teams serving Russia. And I think it’s really one of those moments where you see our journalists living up to the task and the challenge that they face. And it’s really inspiring.” His words have a sombre resonance today.
An added poignancy to the attacks on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America is given by the fact that Musk and other American authoritarians seem to be learning from the so-called “hybrid democracies” of central Europe. As we reported in November, state broadcasters were one of the first targets of the ultra-right governments of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Robert Fico in Slovakia.
In 2017, my colleague Sally Gimson also looked at attacks on Radio Free Europe from the government in Georgia and asked what role it would have in the future.
She remarked that as a young actor, future US President Ronald Reagan was proud to promote the work of the broadcaster in the early 1950s, fronting up an advertisement for it. “This station daily pierces the Iron Curtain with the truth, answering the lies of the Kremlin and bringing a message of hope to millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain,” he said.
The position the present US government takes towards such a venerated institution is a sign of how far it has drifted from what was once considered patriotic. That old cold warrior Ronald Reagan will be turning in his grave.
