Mérték Media Monitor is now publishing its 10th Soft Censorship report. In its first year, 2013, the report was prepared as part of an international project in cooperation with WAN-IFRA (World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers), and it is telling of the timelessness of the material that even then it was about the capture of the Hungarian media system.1 It quickly became clear that documenting the media situation in Hungary was much more important than presenting the changes on a one-off basis, so the Soft Censorship report eventually became a series. Soft censorship, or indirect censorship, is an indirect method of controlling and influencing media con tent, that achieves its goals by reshaping the structure of the media market and manipulating economic resources rather than through direct censorship. The media laws adopted in 2010 and their amendments created a regulatory environment that enabled establish extremely high market concentration, the elim ination of the autonomy of public service media, and the operation a one-party media authority. Much has changed over the past decade and a half, but the logic has remained the same: instead of a free, diverse, and market-based media, a politically dominated media system has emerged. In all our reports to date, we have observed that the situation has deteriorated compared to previous years, and 2024 was no exception. The summary of the year indicates that the work of journalists has become increasingly difficult, advertising spending has risen to absurdly high levels in the European and local election campaigns, and the public service media has unreservedly followed government commu nications.

Market trends continued to follow the pattern seen so far, with the vast majority of revenues flowing to pro-government media, while the extremely popular independent media, which often shapes public opinion, received a much smaller share of revenues, only 23.6 per cent. The media legal environment has changed in a number of important ways, although real change is only expected later, with the European Media Freedom Act, which was passed in 2024 but will only come into force at a later date. The media authority continues to reallocate radio frequencies in the same way. How ever, a positive development in 2024 is that some radio stations without visible ties to the ruling party were also granted frequencies. The most important and saddest development of 2024 is undoubtedly the launch of the Sovereignty Protection Office. As could be suspected when the office was established, its main goal is to discredit independent media and civil society: previously, this was done by pro-government media and various political influencers, but since 2024, the Sovereignty Protection Office has also been involved in pro ducing this discrediting material. From this point of view, the year can be considered symbolic, as the control of public opinion has truly reached a new level.

The study is available here: