The news is bad in Hungary

I f you’re wondering what attacks on the news media around the world mean for the future of democracy, it’s worth a trip to Budapest. Consider it a cautionary-tale vacation. When I visited Hungary recently, I knew I was entering a waning democracy that’s become increasingly authoritarian. I knew that Prime Minister Viktor Orban won a third term in April by convincing voters that a phantasmic combination of Muslim migrants, the Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros and European Union bureaucrats was coming to get them.

But I only understood how Orban pulled this off when I spoke to Hungarian journalists. They explained that Orban first criticised the press for being biased against him. Then he and his allies took over most of it, and switched to running stories that promote Orban’s populist agenda and his party, Fidesz. This happened fast. The investigative website Atlatszo estimates that more than 500 Hungarian media titles are now controlled by Orban and his friends; in 2015, only 23 of them were.

Loyalty trumps experience: Hungary’s biggest media mogul is a former pipe fitter from Orban’s hometown. In some cases, Orban allies bought publications and shut them down. One morning in 2016, journalists at Nepszabadsag, one of Hungary’s biggest dailies, were simply locked out of their offices. Its new owner, an Austrian businessman, claimed financial problems; the paper had just run a series of articles exposing government corruption.

Other news organisations were bought and transformed from within. Some now reportedly take their talking points directly from the government. Recent headlines at Origo — once a respected online news site — were a numbing assortment of articles about migrants wreaking havoc on various European cities and conspiracies about Soros. Headlines were strikingly similar on the website of Lokal, co-founded in 2015 by one of Orban’s top advisers. Its free print version, handed out at train and bus stations, is now Hungary’s highest-circulation newspaper.

There’s still independent news online, but most Hungarians don’t see it. And when one of these websites exposes corruption, Orban-friendly publications align to attack it. “This is what the government would like to teach society — that there are no reliable sources at all among those who criticise the government,” explained Attila Batorfy, who tracks the Hungarian media for Atlatszo. Hungary was especially vulnerable to this kind of takeover. The country became a democracy only in 1989. And government advertising for everything from the national lottery to the state opera is still a key source of revenue for media companies, and has long been doled out to friends.

Still, journalists I met in Budapest were struck by how quickly the press had changed, and that all it took to break this pillar of democracy was a combination of money and fear. “It’s not Russia,” Lukacs Csaba told me. “No one thinks that someone will be shot. Everyone thinks that he will lose his job. It’s enough.” Csaba was a senior reporter at Magyar Nemzet, an 80-year-old daily newspaper that closed in April. (Its government advertising evaporated after its owner broke with Orban.) In May, Csaba and two dozen former colleagues started a weekly called Magyar Hang (Hungarian Voice), which operates out of a one-room Budapest storefront.

Most of its issues have no advertisements, because companies fear drawing the government’s ire by association, Csaba said. The paper is printed across the border in Slovakia, because no Hungarian printer would do it. “One of the biggest problems is that people are afraid to be subscribers,” he added. Its journalists worked unpaid for the first two months. Now they sell enough copies — just under 10,000 per week, mostly at newsstands — to pay themselves the minimum wage.

Magyar Hang is a conservative, centre-right newspaper — no more radical than The Wall Street Journal. Some of its writers, including Csaba, used to support Fidesz. But because they’re willing to criticise the ruling party and report on official malfeasance, the government hasn’t credentialed its reporters, so they can’t attend its news conferences and question officials there, Csaba said.

And no state entity responds to their calls. “If we ask someone from the governmental hospital, ‘How many cases of infections?’ they will not answer us,” he said. “For Fidesz, it’s not enough to be loyal, you have to be servile. You have to follow their instructions without questions, without any doubt.” The news media isn’t Orban’s only victim. Last week, Central European University, co-founded by Soros, announced that, barring a last-minute deal, it will move its main operations from Budapest to Vienna, because of the government’s attacks. But the media is a special target for autocracies and waning democracies everywhere.

Brazil’s president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, has threatened to pull state advertising from Folha de São Paulo. The Brazilian newspaper ran an exposé describing how supporters of Bolsonaro financed a WhatsApp misinformation campaign to help him win. Trump regularly claims that articles critical of him are simply made up, and calls journalists the “enemy of the people.” And Saudi Arabia’s government apparently masterminded the murder of its critic Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post. Hungary shows that under the right circumstances, attacks on the press can keep getting worse.

And voters might respond by just tuning everything out. A Pew survey this year that looked at 10 European countries found that Hungarians were least likely to closely follow local and national news. Near the end of my trip I spoke with Gyorgy Zsombor, the editor in chief of Magyar Hang. “We couldn’t imagine 10 years ago that it would happen in Hungary,” he told me. “We thought democracy was stronger.”