“V4 News Agency (V4NA) is a new international news agency […] With headquarters and headquarters in London (United Kingdom). […] Our newsroom of 50 journalists and our rapid reaction news teams are where the leading news is happening in Europe. London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Warsaw. We are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. without exception.”
The news agency, founded by Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, the current war minister and then-ambassador to London, promoted itself with this speech on its website in late 2018. The ownership structure of V4NA Ltd. was quickly formed: Ambassador held a symbolic 3 percent share, the main owner became the New Wave Media Group owned by Fidesz Kesma Holding, which also publishes Orikot, and 40 percent belonged to the company. Arbat Haboni.
At the time, domestic and international media such as the Guardian reported that Orban’s inner circle had established a media company on British soil. In recent years, V4NA’s name may well have been etched in the minds of consumers of government media, as media productions owned by KESMA have received more than 3,000 news stories since 2019.
However, it is now clear that V4NA’s basic claims about itself are at least questionable. Átlátszó revealed it in a recent fact-finding articleThat
- News from the V4 news agency is definitely not edited in London. The business never had more than 2 UK employees.
- This story was previously edited at the Globe 3 office building in Óbuda and is currently being written in Hungary.
- According to a former employee, they didn’t have a newsroom with 50 journalists.
- They had no correspondents throughout Europe.
A former V4NA employee told Átlátszó that he worked in Łódź instead of London and that he saw no sign of a European correspondent network.
Átlátszó found nothing in the purported location of the London editorial office, but instead received confirmed information from multiple sources that V4NA’s materials were all written in Hungary, while state media presented them as news agency material transcribed by on-site reporters.
According to a former employee who opened up for Átlátszó, the teacher’s office occupied a large room in the Globe 3 office building that housed 20-30 workstations. Most of them were always unused, according to his story, “a few journalists” and the two editors in charge were inside at the same time, “they were almost lost behind the big monitors”, he said.
The Átlátszó reporter could not find an editorial office at the address provided by V4NA in London, but a business registration company, for example, advertises as follows, and then went there.
“This company building package is ideal for our clients who live outside the UK. It is ideal if you want to impress your clients with a high-value London address.
V4NA’s headquarters was simultaneously the “hub” of thousands of other businesses. At the record label’s new building, Porter confirmed that “Today, V4NA Limited is officially headquartered here.”
Átlátszó went to the editorial office’s London address, but found no sign that it worked there. Renting something in the V4 building is not ruled out, but they are not looking at a regular editorial office.
In Budapest, they concluded that Antal Tamás Tóth, editor-in-chief of V4, based on MediaWorks’ internal phone book.He spent his working days in the content development directorate at Mediaworks’ Üllői út headquarters. This fact was confirmed to them on the spot, but in the end they were unable to speak to Toth.
At the door of the Óbuda office building, they were told that the V4 editorial would work there, but it had already moved.
According to the interview source’s estimate, the editorial office in Budapest could employ a maximum of 20 people, and he did not experience anyone in the department gathering information, but instead transcribing news found on the Internet. According to the reports of V4NA Ltd, there are 2 employees in 2019 and 1 employee in 2020 and 2021.
Already in 2020, the V4NA materials of the 444 became suspect, In our article at that time Based on the analysis of several messages, we came to the following conclusion:
“In collaboration with the Center for Independent Media, it analyzed how V4NA appears in 444 media outlets and what topics it covers. Compared to many of KESMA’s domestic papers, V4NA travels less to spread outright fake news, but tends to select foreign newspaper reviews that MTI doesn’t want to deal with. What about outright falsification? There is no question, but rather we have encountered small slips, for example opinions are constantly presented as facts. In several cases, V4NA appears to have replaced the Russian state-owned Russia Today in the Fidesz media, material previously taken from Russian sources is now reviewed by V4NA.
Based on the 129 V4NA materials published in the government party press in July, fifty employees do not appear to be working in the agency, either qualitatively or quantitatively.”
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