The new Hungarian law on the media aims at reaching a balanced publication pattern. Ideally such information flow would arise from the freedom of the press, the multitude of views being published in all sorts of media. Also, bad quality would be punished by market forces driving low quality publications bankrupt. Unfortunately the exact opposite happened over the past decades. Bad quality (bad as partial, aesthetically disgusting, junk etc) has been consistently maintained by hordes of media people being paid by left wing politicians and business people. Unfortunately, after a while the sense of taste gets blunted and new generations of people grow up taking in whatever the media cooks for them in a "normal" process. We have seen how this works during communism. The few rebels have been marginalized effectively. What can be done in such a situation? Wait 20 years for new generations and the dung to be cleaned from the media? The government wants something quicker and more effective. They took all the media las in the EU and some scissors and cut and pasted a new law that enforces in various ways balanced publication of information as well as quotas for qualty items to be published. "Balance" and aesthetics are definitely subjective terms but for now the media has to take its bitter medicine until we see some improvement. There is no point lower than where we start from.
Slashdot Mirror
The new Hungarian law on the media aims at reaching a balanced publication pattern. Ideally such information flow would arise from the freedom of the press, the multitude of views being published in all sorts of media. Also, bad quality would be punished by market forces driving low quality publications bankrupt. Unfortunately the exact opposite happened over the past decades. Bad quality (bad as partial, aesthetically disgusting, junk etc) has been consistently maintained by hordes of media people being paid by left wing politicians and business people. Unfortunately, after a while the sense of taste gets blunted and new generations of people grow up taking in whatever the media cooks for them in a "normal" process. We have seen how this works during communism. The few rebels have been marginalized effectively. What can be done in such a situation? Wait 20 years for new generations and the dung to be cleaned from the media? The government wants something quicker and more effective. They took all the media las in the EU and some scissors and cut and pasted a new law that enforces in various ways balanced publication of information as well as quotas for qualty items to be published. "Balance" and aesthetics are definitely subjective terms but for now the media has to take its bitter medicine until we see some improvement. There is no point lower than where we start from.