For the ninth year, Mérték Media Monitor publishes the Soft Censorship Report, which analyses, researches and documents the main events and trends in Hungarian media over the past year.

What is soft censorship? Soft censorship or indirect censorship refers to media policy interventions that significantly increase the chances of certain views reaching the audience by shaping the structure of the media market and manipulating the allocation of media market resources, while significantly reducing the chances of others. We interpret soft censorship as arbitrary interference with the structure of the media market and the economic scope of media companies. Its aim is to strengthen those companies in the media value chain as a whole that help to convey the government’s views, while at the same time weakening, economically disabling or forcing media outlets that are critical of the government to abandon their critical views.
The changes brought about by soft censorship are slow, the interventions are indirect and the process is not spectacular. Soft censorship is aimed at shaping the content offer as a whole, so media companies are at the centre.

In our analysis, we find that the domestic media market in 2023 has not changed radically, but two of the events in the outside world have had a major impact, raising further concerns. The European regulation of global platforms does not seem to bring any meaningful change in the relationship between Hungarian content providers and platforms, but it will further strengthen the position of the media authority, which has been occupied by Fidesz since 2010. On the other hand, the failure of our European case on state aid for public service media also takes the last legal tools out of our hands, which could have helped us to steer the over-politicised media system and the distorted media market at least partly in a direction that would have been in line with democratic standards.

If there were only two numbers to describe the distorted media market, one would be the distribution of revenues. Including the budget of public service media, the major media companies that are also present in the news market account for 347 billion forints in revenues, and the share of independent media is only 23 percent. This ratio shows the distorted Hungarian market conditions, a market that has been captured for years. Another important figure is that 77.7 percent of the list price of HUF 86 billion of state advertising expenditure went to four largest media groups close to the government. The evolution of state advertising spending and its market distorting effect has been well documented for years. It remains the case that the state, including state-owned companies, advertise in pro-government media for very significant sums, while spending little or no money in media critical of the government. This essentially constitutes state aid for the pro-government media, helping to finance its operations, but at the same time puts independent media at a competitive disadvantage, which have to survive in an increasingly difficult market environment.

In addition to the general overview, media market events and changes in the media law environment that are included in the analysis every year, two new topics were added: five of the independent Hungarian newsrooms – 24.hu, 444.hu, Debreciner, HVG and Telex – gave in-depth interviews on their relationship with global platforms. The editors agreed that these platforms continue to play a major role in reaching readers of independent media, but due to their unpredictable and opaque operation, they have all started to develop different strategies to become more independent from social media platforms in the future.

The other new topic is a detailed presentation of Mérték’s European competition case launched in 2016. In 2016, we submitted a complaint together with Klubrádió and then MEP Benedek Jávor, alleging that the financing of Hungarian public service media did not comply with European rules on state aid. The European Union’s room for manoeuvre in regulating public service media is very limited, but this does not mean that the EU is completely powerless to tackle abuses in the operation of public service media. Public service media, as a media market player that also relies on state aid for its operation, are in principle subject to EU state aid competition rules. The European Commission has extensive experience in tackling market-distorting public media funding. On this basis, we were right to expect that opaque public spending in the Hungarian public service institutions, used without external control and with unclear objectives, would also attract the interest of the European Commission. If the Commission had found that Hungarian public media funding was not in line with European expectations, it would have been able to force changes in the MTVA-Duna Media Service Provider system that would have significantly improved the situation of media freedom. This did not happen in the end, so everything in the Hungarian public service media is unlikely to change.

The report is available here (in Hungarian).