The market is highly concentrated as the KESMA Foundation — built to serve Viktor Orban’s government, just like public media outlets — which holds around 500 national and local media outlets. However, independent media outlets maintain strong positions in other segments of the national market. They include the RTL Klub television network, the YouTube channel Partizán, the daily Népszava, the weekly HVG, and the news sites 24.hu, 444.hu and Telex. 

During Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s 16-year-long rule, public broadcasting was turned into a propaganda machine and several private media outlets were taken over or silenced. As a result of political and economic manoeuvres and the buyout of media outlets by oligarchs with close ties to Fidesz, the former ruling party, this group now controls 80% of the country’s media landscape.  

Regulatory agencies – which were under total control of Fidesz – have absolved themselves of their responsibility to deal with the concentration of ownership of the private media and political control of the public media by claiming lack of jurisdiction. In 2021, the agencies arbitrarily banned the last major independent radio station, Klubradio, from the airwaves, which led to Hungary being condemned by the EU Court of Justice. The Sovereignty Protection Office, created by a law adopted in 2023, was a tool for smear campaigns against journalists. 

The midsize media market is not accustomed to monetising content and, during the Orban years, the sustainable funding of independent media was threatened by the discriminatory allocation of state advertising in favour of pro-government outlets. The shrinking revenue of major news site Index.hu enabled a company close to Fidesz to take it over in 2020; the same company also bought the country’s biggest newspaper, Blikk, in 2025. 

Viktor Orban’s government regularly accused critical media outlets of spreading false information and of being financed by George Soros, the American billionaire of Hungarian and Jewish origin, a rhetoric echoed by pro-government media. Furthermore, conservative forces within the former government benefited from the weak legal framework to initiate proceedings against journalistic content deemed too liberal.

While Hungarian journalists are only rarely subject to physical assault or unjustified police interrogation, the Hungarian state is the only European Union member to have arbitrarily monitored journalists using Pegasus spyware. As smear campaigns against journalists have proliferated, those critical of Orban’s former government have been harassed online by supporters of Fidesz.