Hungary
In April 2026, Hungary held a historic election. Voters ousted Fidesz, the governing party, after sixteen years in power and elected Péter Magyar in a landslide victory. This happened in the most advanced system of media capture in the EU, with the Orbán government controlling over 80% of the media and followed an AI-fuelled campaign from the ruling party and a social media-based campaign from the challenger Tisza party.
Over the past year, the Hungarian media sphere was largely shaped by the campaign for the 2026 general elections, when Viktor Orbán faced significant opposition for the first time in 16 years. As the ruling party's popularity declined, it deployed a range of tools – escalating rhetoric, legislative measures to suppress critical voices, social media and billboard campaigns, manoeuvres in the media market, and AI-generated deepfakes – alongside economic transfers and the use of state resources. The main Fidesz narrative was anti-Ukrainian, claiming that Hungary was facing an imminent threat of war. The challenger Tisza party and its leader Péter Magyar campaigned mostly on domestic issues, such as corruption and economic problems, with heavy reliance on organic social media content and face-to-face encounters with voters. Within hours of his victory Magyar promised that, after taking office, he would suspend the news service of the PSB until impartial reporting can be ensured.
Fidesz's attempts in 2025 to suffocate independent voices by introducing a bill to fine and ban organisations receiving any foreign funding were in the end suspended, but also backfired. The attacks fuelled record donation levels for independent media under a scheme that allows taxpayers to donate 1% of their personal income tax to an NGO of their choice, with independent news portal Telex and YouTube channel Partizán receiving more donations than any other civic group in Hungary.
Readers' donations are an important source of revenue for independent media, which also often rely on a combination of advertising revenue, subscriptions (444, 24.hu, HVG), memberships, donations (Partizán, Telex, Direkt36, Átlátszó, Magyar Hang, Válasz Online), and foreign grants.
In contrast, pro-Fidesz-government media outlets, such as most legacy media (commercial television channel TV2, news channel HírTV, the daily Magyar Nemzet, Retro Rádió and Rádio 1, many local newspapers) and online media such as index.hu, origo.hu, and mandiner.hu, often relied on state advertising which functioned as covert state support.
The 2025 acquisition from the Swiss Ringier company of the most popular Hungarian newspaper, the tabloid Blikk, and its online version, by a pro-Fidesz-government media group, Indamedia (owner of Index), meant that Blikk became yet another outlet amplifying Fidesz's messaging. By April 2026 only 17 foreign media companies remained in Hungary, down from 57 in 2010, the most prominent being RTL, further centralising the market. Meanwhile, Radio Free Europe Hungary, an important news source, ceased operations in November 2025 after its funding was cut by the US administration.
In addition to using traditional media outlets, the Orbán government and its proxies relied on Facebook and YouTube to reach the electorate. They were among the largest spenders on political advertising in Europe. From late 2024 to September 2025, €10,585,970 was spent on political advertising on Meta and Google in Hungary, 87% from Fidesz-government-aligned actors.1 When both platforms banned political advertising in Europe in October 2025, Fidesz tried adapting by mobilising supporters to boost the visibility of its posts on Facebook, but it could not compete with the opposition’s organic reach.
Orbán’s challenger Magyar relied heavily on social media, given his lack of access to Fidesz-controlled media. An analysis of the prime-time PSB news bulletin from February to December 2025 found that opposition politicians got less than 5% of the airtime, with Magyar appearing mostly in a negative context.2 Magyar has harshly criticised independent media on a number of occasions, yet in his first post-election press conference, in a marked departure from the Orbán government’s practice, independent media were called on first.
In the intense election campaign, Hungary experienced a rapid surge in AI-generated political content. A new company run by a Fidesz ally, and funded from undisclosed sources, became the largest spender on political advertising on YouTube in the EU during the summer of 2025. Its AI-generated videos smearing Magyar were shown an estimated 650m times across YouTube and Facebook.3 Some deepfakes were shared by Orbán himself and by mainstream media, including the PSB, M1. Deepfake images of Magyar also appeared on billboards nationwide. Meanwhile, independent media contributed to our understanding of the nature of the Orbán regime through the publication of a wide range of high-quality content.
Judit Szakács
CEU Democracy Institute
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Methodology note
We introduced education quotas in 2023 to make data more representative of national populations. Part of the declines in reach in the source chart between 2022 and 2023 will be because there are more people with lower levels of education in our sample, who typically have lower interest in news.
Pay for online news
6%
(-2)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
45%
(+4)
Trust in news overall
17%
(-5)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news declined by 5pp to 17%, the lowest figure recorded for Hungary since 2016, and the lowest of all 48 markets this year. The brands enjoying the most trust are independent while those with the lowest trust are Fidesz-government-aligned, including the public service broadcaster, MTV.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
74/180
Score 59.85
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://politicalcapital.hu/news.php?article_read=1&article_id=3615
2 https://en.republikon.hu/media/175624/eves_koezmedia_monitoring_ford.pdf
3 https://telex.hu/techtud/2025/10/02/tobb-mint-650-millioszor-futottak-le-harom-honap-alatt-facebookon-es-youtube-on-a-nemzeti-ellenallas-mozgalom-reklamjai