PRAGUE — Decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Radio Free Europe is back — to bring media freedom to the EU.
The U.S. government-funded news outlet will resume its Hungarian-language reporting later this year, after restarting its Romanian and Bulgarian-language operations in 2019.
At a time when Brussels is struggling to address rule-of-law concerns in some member countries, American taxpayer dollars are being mobilized to try to free the flow of information in three of the EU's eastern members.
"We’re not saying with our return that these are countries where there is no media plurality, because there are in most of these cases diversity of media options," said Jamie Fly, president and CEO of Radio Free Europe. "The question is, are those media outlets able to report on issues in an objective, balanced way" and "explore politically sensitive issues?"
Watchdog groups and journalists over the past few years have raised concerns about the media environment in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, while American officials say they are worried about the spread of Russian disinformation in the region. Last year, U.S.-based think tank Freedom House ranked Hungary as "partly free" for the first time since the fall of communism.
