Hungary’s incoming Prime Minister Peter Magyar just did to their state media what a lot of us in the U.S. have been dreaming someone would do to Fox News. Days after a landslide victory that ended Viktor Orban’s 16 year grip on power, Magyar walked onto M1, the state television channel he had been banned from for over a year, and told the interviewer to her face that her outlet had spent years spreading “fear and despair” among the population and that the whole operation would be shut down and rebuilt as a real public broadcaster. He called what Orban had built something “Goebbels or the North Korean leadership would admire,” adding that “not a single true word” had been spoken there. No hedging, no diplomatic throat clearing. Just the truth, on their own airwaves.

Magyar had already set the tone on election night, telling tens of thousands of supporters along the Danube that “tonight, truth prevailed over lies.” He promised the Hungarian people “a complete change of regime,” not just a new government, and vowed to create independent media standards that rival or exceed the BBC.

And look, it is hard not to sit here in America and feel the sting of contrast. We have our own state-adjacent propaganda machine running 24 hours a day, and the best we get from our leaders is a strongly worded tweet. Magyar looked straight into the camera of the outlet that had lied about him for years and said, essentially, this ends now. That is not just good politics. That is the kind of accountability that most of us have completely stopped imagining is possible.