A Hungarian TV journalist is nearing Mahatma Gandhi’s limit of 21 days for a hunger strike. 44-year-old Balazs Nagy Navarro has been sitting at the doorstep of Hungary’s Public Television Bureau for 19 days in below-freezing temperatures.

The protests that have swept through the world over the last year have finally reached Hungary. Christmas found thousands of Hungarians on the streets chanting DE-MOC-RA-CY! and FREEDOM-OF-THE-PRESS! at demonstrations against Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Navarro, a television journalist and vice president of one of the largest unions of broadcast journalists sees himself fighting for basic democratic rights such as fairness in public media.

Navarro and a fellow journalist, Aranka Szavuly, who also joined the hunger strike, are fed up with what they say is extensive news manipulation by the center-right ruling administration. For them, the last straw came on December 3, when images of  Zoltan Lomnici, the former chief judge of the Hungarian Supreme Court, were digitally blurred out in the evening news reports by two of the three state television channels. Lomnici held a press conference together with Laszlo Tokes, the other leader of the Council of Human Dignity, but only the latter was visible in the boradcasted images. The figure of Lomnici was pixelated in the background.

Lomnici is said to be persona non grata on state television due to a personal conflict, public media sources told Reuters confirming that personal revenge might have been behind the incident.

The hunger strike of Navarro and a few other journalists protesting for “fair public media” is a desperate attempt on their part to shake their countrymen out of what they say is national apathy. In reality, Hungarians are getting more and more frustrated by the political leadership failing to tackle the ailing economy and not playing according to traditional rules.

Following the defeat of the socialist Prime Minister (who admitted lying about the country’s poor finances to win the election), the present center-right government limited the rights of the top Constitutional Court, dismantled an independent budget oversight body and renationalised private pension assets. On the top of all that, the government enacted a new media law that, according to its critics, gives uncontrollable government influence over public media.

Yet most Hungarians fear losing the little they still have. “There is a lack of solidarity here,” Iren Kembe, the mother of hunger striker Sorel Kembe, said. ”We see layoffs happening to others but we think it won’t touch us.”

It was early March and Kristalina Georgieva, the European Commissioner of International Cooperation Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, was traveling in Asia. Her plan was to attend a 7.5 magnitude earthquake simulation that would hit Indonesia and generate a tsunami. A few things, however, changed in her itinerary: The destination turned out to be Japan, the earthquake was 9.0 and it not only generated a huge tsunami, but also a nuclear catastrophe. Plus, it was real.

“Usually our fears are bigger than reality. In this case our reality was worse than our fears,” Georgieva said recently at a World Bank panel on the climate, food and financial crises the world is facing today and the way they all intertwine. Georgieva’s strong Slavic optimism brightened the gloomy panel, but the data she threw in didn’t back up her positive view:

Hold on for a second. How can these disasters have such a devastating impact on us when cutting-edge technology, extensive knowledge and interconnectedness are here to help us mitigate them?

This question left the representatives of Uganda – who followed the event via webcast — puzzled. So they raised the simplest but toughest question for the panel:

“We seem to know the problem and we also seem to know the answer. The question is then: Why are we not responding?”

No one on the panel disagreed with World Bank’s managing director, Ngozi Okonjo-Iewala, who wasn’t shy to name those she blamed and to evoke “the fear of God” in them:

I wish it were the awarding of its 14th Nobel Prize that is putting my country in the news these days.

Instead, Hungary is back on the world stage because of a disastrous chemical spill. An avalanche of a highly alkaline mud that could fill 440 Olympic-sized swimming pools has broken through the shoddy containment walls at an aluminum plant not far from the Lake Balaton region. As a result, nine people have died and 250 were injured. Wild and farm animals have perished, and lands and little summer gardens that were the villagers’ food and staple for winter have been ravished.

The 16th century castle in Devecser has surely seen a lot but now looks over hundreds of homes doomed to demolition. Kolontar, the village right under the alumina pond has even been compared to Chernobyl, the infamous home of a nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine in 1986.

But a comparison of this sort only adds more damage to the grief: The red mud, as bad as it looks, is not highly radioactive, which was the case with Chernobyl. What makes the red sludge dangerous is alkali, which can dissolve skin as water dissolves soap. Eating up shoes and rubber boots, alkali left villagers with second- and third-degree burns.

Unfortunately, Alkali is all too familiar to Hungarians.

“Heartbroken maids would drink [alkali-rich] laundry detergent in the 19th century,” Dr. Zoltan Komaromi, secretary of the Hungarian Medical Chamber, said. “Alkali dissolves the esophagus immediately so drinking it used to be a popular way of committing suicide.”

When my editorial assistant, Mirjam Donath, traveled to her native Hungary recently, I asked her to look into some of the ethical issues faced by journalists there.

In a coincidental piece of timing, Hungary’s president this week signed into a law controversial media legislation that has drawn criticism from constitutional law experts and press freedom advocates. So Mirjam’s interviews in Hungary are all the more newsworthy now.

Over to Mirjam.

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If the man who introduced the ombudsman institution to Hungary says that the freedom of the Hungarian press is in danger, a journalist takes notice. And Laszlo Majtenyi, the first Freedom of Information Commissioner of Hungary and former president of the media supervisory authority (ORTT), warned me of just that during my recent visit to Budapest.

Following the first round of the Hungarian elections, analysts predicted that the two-thirds majority of the center-right party, Fidesz, which formed Hungary’s new government in April, was to have a slightly positive impact on financial markets. This unprecedented mandate, which gives the government the power to make even constitutional changes without the consent of the opposition, promised relatively quick implementation of economic reforms.

But as soon as the government came into power, first the Hungarian currency, the Forint, tumbled in early June. Then, the IMF suspended negotiations on Hungary’s funding program in July. And this week, President Pal Schmitt signed the most controversial part of the new media law package, which was condemned by constitutional experts in Hungary and press freedom watchdogs abroad.