The European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) sent a fact-finding mission to Hungary in November, 2022, with the formally communicated aim of gaining an insight into the situation of education in Hungary. The EP’s Liaison Office in Budapest asked us to launch a short-term media monitoring project, collecting and sending them the Hungarian media coverage of the teachers’ protests that were in progress at the time of their visit. We configured our PressMonitor media monitoring system for the task, set new key words, search rules – anticipating the content of the news –, and set up a new monitoring feed, as well. We notified our external suppliers about the additional work, and the EP received the requested daily thematic reviews each morning during their stay in Budapest.
In June 2022, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium asked us to expand our monitoring of the institution to include news about its researchers. The publications included interviews and publicist articles. In response to this request, more than 30 researchers have been added to the MCC search terms. A key aspect was the monitoring of international publications, as the MCC is increasingly present in many places, including Brussels, and is a prominent player in national and regional public, scientific and cultural circles.
Our book, Hungary on Front Pages – The history of Hungary from the perspective of the western media 1848-2020 has been published and is available now in bookstores. With its interesting and special topic, detailed narrative and spectacular appearance, this wonderful book stands out from other history-topic books published in recent years. The book tells the history of Hungary through western print media with the help of approximately 400 international front page stories, hundreds of articles and several still unknown press photographs. The official book launch event was on 18 November 2021, in the Kodaly room of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. At the event, acknowledged historians, the authors of our book, presented the individual chapters in the form of lectures and panel discussions. The audience listened to the interesting analyses of particular historic eras in the presentation of Róbert Hermann, Iván Bertényi Jr., Ignác Romsics, László Eörsi, Tibor Valuch and Péter Tölgyessy. The attendees also learned a lot of interesting details about Hungary’s international front page history.
In 2021, we did media monitoring and a report on sports diplomacy for Richter Gedeon Plc. The reason for the report was the decision of the International Modern Pentathlon Union in early November 2021 to remove horse riding from the pentathlon programme after the 2024 Paris Olympics. Following the UIPM's decision, an international protest was launched, with more than 650 pentathletes calling on the UIPM’s leaders to resign. In Hungary, former and current Olympic and world champions of the sport wrote an open letter to the Hungarian federation asking it to reject UIPM’s decision and to the President of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, to save equestrian sports. Richter Gedeon Plc. was interested about the international media coverage of the protest wave. Our report covered English, German, French and Hungarian language news items in the mentioned period.