The sorry tale of the Hungarian media

I asked a friend, a well-established writer, how much he earns as an editor at a Hungarian literary magazine. ‘Less than a schoolteacher,’ he answered laconically. Considering that the net salary of a fortyish Hungarian grammar-school teacher is about 850 euros, the worst in the European Union, this means ignominiously little.

The attraction of working as an editor or staff columnist at a literary journal in Hungary is not the money, which is not much more than a supplementary income. It’s the fact that you have a steady job, meaning that you don’t have to pay the crushing taxes of a self-employed cultural worker. Literature isn’t a lucrative business to start with: and Hungary’s market for serious literature is small, and getting smaller. If you have that kind of talent, you may receive royalties; but more likely you will struggle to make a living.

Modern cultural life in Hungary has historically been organized by and around magazines. The biweekly Nyugat (‘West’) was the most important literary forum from 1908 to 1941, while Színházi Élet (‘Theatre Life’) was an immensely popular illustrated weekly cultural magazine from 1910 until 1938, when anti-Jewish laws forced it to close. After the War, the flourishing of a free cultural press was cut short by the full communist takeover in 1948–49. But during the post-1953 thaw, Irodalmi Újság (‘Literary journal’), which was founded along the lines of the Soviet Literaturnaya Gazeta, became the forefront of reformist thinking, publishing poems, commentary, and sometimes reportage that sought to reflect ‘the Hungarian reality’.

Irodalmi Újság played an important role in the 1956 revolution and was promptly abolished during the repressions that followed. An ersatz literary weekly, written mostly by communist hardliners, was launched in March 1957. Its title was Élet és Irodalom, meaning ‘Life and literature’. A popular bon mot said there was neither life nor literature in it, and so the magazine was referred to simply as És. Having undergone several incarnations, it continues to be published to this day (and is where the writer of this article is employed as an editor). But the nickname És has stuck – in fact, its web domain name is es.hu.

The golden age

In the decade following the revolution, repression was combined with a cautious opening towards the West, and cultural publishing gained an entirely new framework. Soon after the Soviet invasion and the formation of the Kádár government, writers went on strike, and many intellectuals were put into prison for their roles in the revolution, or in the intellectual movements leading up to 1956 (such as the faithful communist Tibor Déry). Numerous other prominent figures chose exile (including those who relaunched the original Irodalmi Újság in Vienna, London and, finally, Paris).

But the authorities also wanted to show that the old guard could be replaced and that the less rebellious luminaries are welcome in the new establishment. A whole new generation of pro-regime authors, mostly idealistic communists, entered the literary scene. The novelist László Németh, for example, received the prestigious Kossuth Prize in 1957, despite having contributed to the revolutionary issue of Irodalmi Újság.

This period also saw the launch of the key literary monthlies Kortárs (‘The contemporary’) and Új Írás (‘New writing’), as well as Kritika, a high-brow theoretical monthly that quickly moved from boring Marxism towards structuralism. The journal Film Színház Muzsika (‘Film theatre music’) sought to be the successor of Színházi Élet, even in its format and style. Muzsika (Music) was a monthly for a professional audience – and continues to exist today as an online publication.

Two prestigious periodicals were set up dedicated to film: the illustrated biweekly Filmvilág (‘The world of films’), and the monthly Filmkultúra (‘Film culture’), which grew into a haven for free thought during the intellectual fermentation of the late 1960s and early ’70s. The legendary founder and editor-in-chief, Yvette Bíró, was forced into exile in the mid-’70s, and eventually became a professor at New York University.

Intellectual and political revolt sometimes took the form of acquiring and reshaping a literary and cultural monthly. Mozgó Világ (‘World in motion’), which had originally been published under the aegis of the Communist Youth Organization, began to feature young authors who would soon become key figures of literary life, such as Péter Esterházy and György Petri. They were featured alongside up-and-coming thinkers who would enter politics after 1989.

A brief period of virtual independence for Mozgó Világ in the early 1980s came to an end in September 1983 when editor-in-chief Ferenc Kulin was removed, causing the entire editorial staff to resign in protest. Kulin went on to be a member of the first democratically elected parliament. After some pause in publication, the journal was relaunched as a forum for reformist intellectuals around the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. Its original authors and contributors boycotted it, but is still had some interesting art, as well as some not-so-interesting literary material. Mozgó Világ still exists as a moderate leftwing literary and political magazine.

The authorities changed the leadership of Élet és Irodalom several times. From the mid-1960s its editors – who also happened to be experienced literary critics – were some of the best professionals in journalism. The magazine’s brand of mild political criticism coupled with high-quality book and art reviews and complete lack of communist jargon made it popular. By the late 1980s, Élet és Irodalom’s circulation reached 60,000; had more paper been allotted, the figure could have been higher. But alas, most of the raw material was imported from Finland, and the dearth of hard currency resulted in shortages.

Paradoxically, the Golden Age ended with the post-1989 transition in parallel with the rise of press freedom. The financial security of state ownership was gone. Until then, most cultural journals had been published by Pallas, one of the two state publishing houses. But the distinctly conservative first democratically elected government was suspicious of liberal journalists (the suspicion was mutual). The new administration immediately tried to re-shape cultural media, which in turn began to look for new, independent sponsors.

In the case of ÉS, this process took five years, from early 1990 to early 1995. After a long search for sponsors or a publisher who wouldn’t try to influence editorial (it even had a stint with the dynamic, but soon insolvent banker Gábor Princz), the magazine finally found a secure formula. The staff formed a foundation that became the single owner of the limited company, which from then on was the publisher. With an initial injection of capital, Élet és Irodalom became self-supporting.

But others never made it. Amidst the all-pervasive financial instability, it was the rise in printing costs combined with the fall in purchasing power that contributed most to the demise of the cultural press. ÉS’s circulation plummeted to 8,600 by 1993. Were it not for its use of relief printing and graphotypes for black-and-white illustrations – an archaic but cost-saving technology – the magazine would have crumbled. As public discourse started to open up, readers became more interested in politics than in culture; and without the financial backing of publishing companies, most journals couldn’t sustain the losses. Élet és Irodalom’s financial recovery was also helped by sensational pieces of investigative reportage covering the shady dealings of Orbán and his circle, published soon after he became prime minister for the first time in 1998.

How to destroy a public sphere

It wasn’t just cultural publishing that was facing these kinds of problem. In fact, certain structural weaknesses affecting the Hungarian media as a whole are rooted in the period immediately following the collapse of the Soviet-style dictatorship. None of the daily papers founded in the excitement of the transition survived, and nor did most of the political weeklies. This may be a result of the nature of the transformation itself, which was cautious and highly negotiated, and not a revolutionary upheaval. This left the press structure consolidated under the dictatorship intact and prevented new titles emerging with the same significance as Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland or SME in Slovakia.

In 2016, on the eve of the next major phase of decline, the market was dominated by the same four ‘serious’ dailies as thirty years previously. Népszabadság (‘Freedom of the people’) was founded as the communist party’s central organ; after 1989 it turned into a liberal-leftish paper published by the Hungarian subsidiary of the Swiss publishing company Ringier. Népszava (‘Voice of the people’) was a labour movement paper founded in 1877, but now of uneven quality. Magyar Nemzet (‘Hungarian nation’), launched in 1938 as a conservative anti-Nazi daily, was now firmly Orbánist, although kept up some of its conservative traditions. Magyar Hírlap (‘Hungarian news’), founded as the daily paper of the communist government (as opposed to the party), had already turned into an unabashed Fidesz mouthpiece.

Woman reading Népszabadság, 1962. Image: Fortepan — ID 60848, via Wikimedia Commons.

The old papers had retained their old readerships, but their attempts to expand by employing young journalists were half-hearted. Instead they found new owners, typically foreign companies, who started cutting costs and pushing papers toward in a more tabloidy direction. They now fell between two stools: unable to outdo tabloids on their own turf, their staff writers were also mostly incapable of western-style, in-depth journalism. This created a vicious cycle: the decline of quality information and serious commentary further reduced popular demand. Meanwhile, the daily with the largest circulation was the tabloid Blikk, founded in 1994 and also published by Ringier.

Then, in 2016, Népszabadság was shut down literally overnight. Although a shock, particularly for the staff, this did not come out of the blue. In 2014, Ringier had merged with Axel Springer’s Hungarian group. Ringier Axel Springer Magyarország Kft. then decided to sell all its press assets except Blikk and associated magazines. The Hungarian Competition Authority gave the transaction its blessing, on the grounds that such a powerful monopoly (the two largest dailies plus numerous regional dailies) had not been legal in the first place. Népszabadság and the regional papers were sold to Vienna Capital Partners, a company owned mainly by Austrian investor Heinrich Pecina. The latter unified his Hungarian interests in a new private limited company called Mediaworks Hungary Zrt., which closed down Népszabadság in October 2016, citing its huge losses.

Less than three weeks later, Mediaworks was sold to a relatively unknown Hungarian company whose majority owner turned out to be Orbán’s business avatar, Lőrinc Mészáros. Today the company owns four nationwide dailies, all the 19 regional dailies, several weekly and monthly magazines, and a slew of websites. Somewhere along the way, Mediaworks was incorporated into KESMA (Central European Press and Media Foundation), a huge quasi-state enterprise founded in August 2018 with the assets of the businesspeople in Orbán’s network. The government declared this acquisition a transaction of ‘national strategic significance’, meaning that it was none of the Competition Authority’s business.

Advertising autocracy

Aside from the ruling elite’s relentless assault on media pluralism, the demise of the print press in Hungary has also been hastened by the absence of professional solidarity between journalists, together with bad management and an ageing readership. The demise itself is universal, but it was quicker in Hungary than in other Central European countries and in western Europe.

A unique Hungarian factor is the scarcity of advertising. This is nothing new. In the early 2010s, spending on advertising per capita was four times higher in the Slovak press (print and online) than in Hungary. This is partly the result of policies disadvantaging small and medium-sized enterprises adopted by successive Hungarian governments even before the beginning of Orbán’s second term of office in 2010. But it’s not only that SMEs lack money for advertising; they also think that spending on marketing and ads is a waste of money. Large advertisers, meanwhile, and even foreign companies, avoid the independent print media in Hungary.

This isn’t a recent development. Clearly, marketing reach is smaller in an small-circulation print title, but this is not the whole story; even under the first Orbán government (1998–2002), there were examples of large western firms withdrawing ads from independent media for unspecified reasons. Nowadays, the few companies that bother to advertise in print media prefer pro-government outlets. Whether out of fear or in the hope of improving political relations? Who knows?

This withdrawal of advertising from independent media is one symptom of the regime’s autocratic character. Another symptom is the distortion of the media market through pseudo-advertisements posted by companies owned by or close to the government, such as the monopolistic energy giant MVM Group (electricity and gas). Pseudo-advertising includes ‘ads with a social purpose’ placed by the government that are officially non-political, but in reality are sheer propaganda. For much of the pro-government media, these are the main sources of income – in a free market, they wouldn’t survive. Even nominally independent media like Népszava would probably also go bankrupt without government advertising. It’s the heroin of the Hungarian media.

Still, there is a demand for news, and the internet provides fresher, more accessible information than the press or television and radio. In the late 1990s, two large news websites emerged. One was Origo, run by Magyar Telekom, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom; the other was Index, owned by an independent private limited company. For two decades, they ruled the Hungarian news market. This was also something unique to Hungary: the most influential journalistic organizations had no base in the print press.

No one could have imagined that one day they would lose their independence, but that was exactly what happened. Origo was sold by Magyar Telekom on obscure pretexts and by the late 2010s was spewing the crudest government propaganda. Index, after several changes in ownership and management, also landed in Orbán’s wider orbit, and while not belonging to the frontline commando of the propaganda army, it is visibly domesticated.

Islands of quality

Today there are two general daily newspapers left in Hungary, where one, Magyar Nemzet is a propaganda channel for the government and the other, Népszava lives on government alms. All the regional dailies are owned by Mediaworks/KESMA. The two largest news websites, meanwhile, have been occupied by Orbán’s clientele. In the traditional audiovisual media, ‘public’ television and radio are equal to government television and radio. One of the two large TV networks, TV2, is owned by an Orbán associate. The other is RTL Klub, which while not a government mouthpiece, is not an important news source either. Very recently, a recording was published in which the former CEO of RTL Klub, Dirk Gerkens, complained that he had been removed from his position in 2015 under government pressure.

Several other websites offer valuable information and good content, among them 444.hu and Telex, two offshoots of the original Index. Among the print weeklies, four of them are now islands of quality and independence. They are the business-oriented HVG, which has seen better days financially (fifteen years ago it was thick with ads, but no longer); Magyar Narancs, which has dissident origins having been Fidesz’s paper a long, long time ago; Magyar Hang, a project of conservative journalists now in opposition; and Élet és Irodalom. All of them have strong cultural sections, most live on a shoestring, and none are widely read.

Even if you work for a government outlet, being a journalist in Hungary is not a way to get rich. At the larger websites, net salaries are in the region of €1200–2500. I’ve heard of someone earning €800, though ‘I might as well be a dustman,’ they said. Foreign grants are also no guarantee of sustainability, particularly since the government set up an Office for the Protection of Sovereignty in order to prevent foreign-sponsored heresies from entering the public discourse.

The Hungarian government has discovered that social media provide a far more efficient channel for propaganda than traditional media. On Facebook and TikTok, techniques of persuasion are not necessary; memes and sound bites will do. No need to be witty when people prefer boorishness. Posting a few words that will make people angry is much more effective than publishing a newspaper article, which the subscribers may or may not read.

There is now a network of pro-government influencers called Megafon. They claim they don’t receive a single forint of taxpayers’ money; instead, their vast resources come from generous sponsors, who are still government-associated one way or another. In May 2024, Megafon was the top Hungarian advertiser on Facebook, with more than 2 billion forints (€5,000,000); the Hungarian government was second with 679 million (€1,700,000). Even the least-known influencer’s posts were promoted with about 3 million forints (€7500). To put it into perspective: the total social media budget for Élet és Irodalom is 30,000 forints (€75).

Megafon’s declared purpose is to counter-balance liberal propaganda. That seems to be the government’s idea of balance. Now they are now said to be studying Artificial Intelligence. Since experiments have shown that AI is a better liar than real people, we can presumably soon expect Artificial Influencers.

As for the prospects of cultural journals, the problem is the same as that facing Hungarian culture as a whole. There is plenty of talent around, and eager audiences, but less and less funding for independent creation and production. Sooner or later, blogs, podcasts and YouTube videos might replace traditional journalism, or there may be a fusion of the two. The Age of the Critic may not be over yet, but the critic’s role is certainly changing.

And so, at Élet és Irodalom, we are moving with the times. Together with Írók Boltja (‘Writers’ Bookshop’, a popular meeting place in Budapest) we co-produce the monthly ÉS Quartet, where four literary critics discuss and rate (on a 1–10 scale) important new books. The videos can be watched on YouTube, and the edited transcripts are published in the magazine. It’s quite a success.