Central Europe’s Media-Capture Epidemic

The onslaught began immediately after the 2010 general election, when Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his right-wing Fidesz party returned to power. The government immediately adopted a raft of laws imposing new restrictions on media outlets, and established the loyalist-staffed Media Council to enforce them. Within a year or so, all independent journalists who had worked in public media had been ousted, and the public broadcaster became a government mouthpiece.

Since then, Fidesz has steadily tightened its grip on Hungarian media. Through a clutch of supportive oligarchs, the party has seized control of major television and radio stations, news portals, and print media publishers. And in late 2018, Orban-aligned oligarchs established the Central European Press and Media Foundation, which now serves as a holding company for some 500 media entities.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki (L) and Hungarian PM Viktor Orban (R) attend a handover ceremony the child armour of Sigismund II Augustus on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Visegrad Cooperation in Krakow, southern Poland, 17 February 2021. EPA-EFE/Art Service 2 An inspiration to aspiring autocrats

The effect of such centralization of media ownership and control - not seen since the pre-1989 communist era - has been profound. Last summer, the editor-in-chief of Index, Hungary's leading news portal, was fired on obviously political grounds, prompting a mass exodus of journalists who resigned in protest.

What might once have been dismissed as an isolated experiment by an increasingly autocratic regime has evolved into a comprehensive program of media capture, a term used to describe extreme levels of control by government authorities working in cahoots with...