There are many discussions nowadays about Hungarian citizens’ access to diverse and quality news, as well as about the changes in the patterns of political information. There is broad agreement that the way public discourse works impacts political and social processes, but there are many doubts as to what news sources consumers rely on and how they assess them. The present study sought to survey news consumption patterns and how these change in a period of rapid transformation.

In cooperation with the Medián Public Opinion and Market Research Institute, Mérték Media Monitor has been surveying news consumption and public information patterns since 2014 (the results of the previous surveys are available at mertek.eu under ‘Freedom of the Press’). A decade ago, the scope of the eventual transformation, how radically consumption patterns in the Hungarian media market would change, had been unforeseeable. Our series of surveys clearly show how marginal the role of the print newspaper market has become. Television, too, has lost its previous significance while digital news consumption has become dominant.

It is precisely on account of the changes in the observed consumption patterns that we have dedicated more space than previously to digital media. There are, of course, individual news sources that our survey still does not include separately because of the vast number of media in the digital space – it would be extremely challenging for a survey questionnaire to fully capture the fragmentation of media audiences. Nevertheless, it presents a solid overall picture and provides factual evidence concerning several phenomena we previously could only speculate about.

Like the previous surveys, this study also shows that the respondents’ partisan preferences substantially influence what news sources they opt for. Government party voters prefer pro-government news sources, while opposition voters tend to consume independent media. However, it also emerged that despite widespread assumptions that these are completely insulated bubbles, that is not in fact the case; there is some overlap between the news consumption patterns of government party and opposition voters.

In addition to describing news consumption patterns, this year’s survey also focused on finding out how consumers view the various media outlets in terms of their political orientation and credibility. On the one hand, this question captured the polarisation of Hungarian society, while at the same time it also shone a light on some previously unrecognised trends.

We looked deeper than previously at how conscious consumers are about their news consumption. The study sought to gauge how deliberately users try to resist the allure of algorithms and to what extent they assert their own preferences in consuming news
contents.

The successive surveys carried out by Mérték and Medián aptly document the changes in Hungarian news consumption patterns amidst the rapid transformations of the Hungarian media system and the technological environment. The present study provides substantial help in understanding how news consumers inform themselves and what their general attitudes are.

The full analysis is available by clicking on the Download button at the top-right corner and it was originally published here: https://mertek.eu/2023/06/20/news-islands-in-a-polarised-media-system/