The research conducted by Mérték Media Monitor examined the spread of political narratives in the Hungarian online media, with a particular focus on the statements made by Viktor Orbán in his interview with Kossuth Radio on January 17, 2025, targeting George Soros and Brussels. The research aimed to determine how and how fast the prime minister’s narrative spread in the Hungarian media, which websites were the initiators and followers, and to what extent different political narratives appeared. The study highlights the rapid spread of Orbán’s narrative in the Hungarian online media and the effectiveness of top-down propaganda, showing how the coordinated communication strategy of pro-government media ensures the unified presentation of the message.

The analysis was based on 39,821 articles from nine Hungarian online news portals (24.hu, index.hu, telex.hu, mandiner.hu, magyarnemzet.hu, origo.hu, hirado.hu, blikk.hu, hvg.hu) between January 1 and February 15, 2025. The data was collected from the sentione.com social listening platform on the selected portals. It was processed using text mining tools, and the texts were lemmatized with the huSpaCy language analyzer. The research examined the number of articles on each portal that contained keywords and the proportion of articles with keywords on each page. Additionally, it investigated the textual similarity of articles with keywords, the temporal distribution of their appearance, and the narratives present in the articles. The publication times of the articles were analyzed down to the hour and minute to identify which portals acted as initiators or followers in the dissemination of each narrative.

The results of the research show that the timing and consistency of the dissemination of narratives among government-affiliated media outlets indicate a coordinated communication strategy. The Magyar Nemzet, Mandiner, and Origo, pro-government portals, dominated both in terms of the quantity of narratives and their launch. Magyar Nemzet is the main narrative initiator. On pro-government websites, the proportion of narratives examined is several times higher than on websites critical of the government. In contrast, non-governmental websites tend to participate in the dissemination of narratives more reactively, and their use of language is more diverse.

The study is available here (in Hungarian).