Viktor Orbán’s domination of Hungary’s traditional media landscape was near-total. But many of the country’s independent outlets broke through, producing reporting that laid bare the nature of his regime. Investigative journalist András Pethő explains how they did it.

After returning to power in Hungary 16 years ago, Viktor Orbán and his started taking the country’s free press apart piece by piece, writing a new playbook for how to bring journalism under the heel of the state.

But the propaganda machine he created was not enough to protect the right-wing prime minister indefinitely: On Sunday, Orbán was defeated in a landslide election win by Péter Magyar, who has pledged to suspend biased state media broadcasts and pass a new media law that ensures objective and impartial reporting.

As Hungary heads into this new era, OCCRP spoke to András Pethő, the co-founder, editor, and executive director of OCCRP partner Direkt36, one of several independent outlets that, despite the hostile environment, have published numerous exposes of alleged government corruption in recent years.

Pethő discussed his experiences as an independent journalist navigating Orbán’s Hungary — and what might come next. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

The Orbán government had firm control over traditional press sources. What did its capture of state broadcaster MTVA and more than 470 other media outlets look like?

It started from day one, when they came back to power in 2010. The first piece of legislation was a new media law, or media constitution, as they called it at the time. That laid the groundwork for the whole crackdown. They set up a new media authority — a regulatory body — led by people who were loyal to the government.

Then they went step by step with the capture of the media. First, they started with the low-hanging fruit, public broadcasters that get public funding and are governed by the laws that parliament creates. 
It took one or two years to transform them into a mouthpiece for the government.

Then they went after private media companies. They still cared about the optics, so business people who were close to the government started to buy formerly independent outlets, and they either shut them down or they transformed them into government propaganda. Through this process, they built a whole ecosystem that included almost all radio stations in the country, literally all local newspapers, television channels, and the state newswire. So basically this covered a whole spectrum and that became the propaganda arm of the government.

I wouldn’t even call it reporting because what they did over the last 16 years wasn’t journalism. It was basically a political operation. It was an arm of the government or the governing party. And the only thing they did was serve the government’s purposes. They spread the government’s messages — they even used the same language. They attacked the people who were critical of the government. It was not like in most countries where there are media outlets that lean left or right or have certain sympathies. This was not that.
This was a pure political operation.

How did you experience this change in Hungary’s media in your own job?

When they started to go after private media companies, that started with the outlet where I was working at the time, Origo, one of Hungary’s most popular digital news sites. They put pressure on that news outlet through the owner, and when we started to experience that pressure, we pushed back.

The editor-in-chief was forced out of his job, and then I resigned, and many other people resigned from there, and that was when we decided to set up our own news organization, Direkt36. Another Hungarian OCCRP member, Atlatszo, started even earlier than we did.

This became a kind of pattern, in which journalists from captured institutions, not all of them, but a lot of them who really cared about their independence, set up their own outlets. That’s how independent journalism could stay alive.

Direkt36 and other newer media organizations in Hungary face accusations that they’re not independent, and that you even collaborated with the European Union to overthrow the Orbán government. OCCRP was similarly accused. How do you respond to those accusations?

These attacks usually came when we published something that the government didn’t like and investigations that hurt them. We didn’t really engage in fights directly with government propagandists or politicians because we don’t feel comfortable with that. We didn’t want to be in this victim role. I don’t think it’s productive.

What we did was we turned to our audience, to the public on social media or other platforms, and we told them, ’Listen, we are under attack, and it’s because of you, because they don’t want you to know the story that we are publishing. They don’t want you to know about the corruption inside the government or how the family members of Viktor Orbán are getting rich through public funding and projects.’

And I truly believe that that’s why they’re attacking you. It’s not like they hate you personally — maybe sometimes that’s part of it, but it’s actually because they want to discredit you, they want to intimidate you. And the only ally you have in these situations is your audience — the public. So we always communicate to them, not towards the government.

The government’s propaganda machinery lost a lot of credibility and trust from the people. Especially in the last five, six years, when things didn’t really go well in the country, with the economy and public services, it was clear that there are serious, serious problems.

There was this wider and wider gap between the reality that people were experiencing and the propaganda lies that the government was spreading. They could say everything was fine, and the economy is doing well, but if people go to the grocery store and see that the prices go up every month, then they believe their own eyes in that situation. And then they started to trust news sources like us and other independent outlets more.

Also, the media landscape has changed, kind of ironically because of the crackdown on media outlets in Hungary. We were forced to strike out on our own and innovate, and we just started to see our reach growing. One example we always mention is the documentary we released in February last year about how the Orbán family built a business empire thanks to government and political connections. That film became a blockbuster overnight. As far as I remember, by its second day, it had more than one million views on YouTube. As of today, it has more than 4.2 million views, in a country of 10 million.

Or when we published the story that they brought this operation against the IT system of [Magyar’s] Tisza party, that was similarly huge. When we published a video interview with the whistleblower, with the police insider, it blew up the internet in Hungary. It got millions of views, and the face of the police officer is recognized by everybody now.

If you have a really powerful story, and if you tell it in the right way on the right platform, with the right tools, you can still cut through, and then you can really make a difference.

Some commentators are saying that Orbán’s concession proves he was never really authoritarian. That this is evidence that Hungary’s democracy has been healthy all along. What would you say to them, in light of your experience as a Hungarian journalist?

I don’t think that one action can justify or explain everything that has happened in the previous 16 years. You know, Orbán said it himself that he doesn’t believe in liberal democracies; liberal democracies are not about liberalism, they’re a system where you have checks and balances. He was talking about it quite openly and he tried to systematically dismantle that system. 
He limited the powers of the Constitutional Court, put loyalists in top positions of the judiciary. We already talked about the crackdown on the media. He built a system where there were no checks and balances.

Maybe Hungary was not a dictatorship, but it was not a healthy democracy either. It’s not like turning a switch where you go in one moment from a democracy to a dictatorship. It’s a process, it’s a path, and we were on that path towards a more autocratic or dictatorial system. Maybe, luckily, we didn’t reach that point.

The incoming administration says it aims to ensure that no single political party can ever again capture the country’s media, and has promised legal safeguards to protect journalists from the type of surveillance and legal harassment used under Orbán. During his first interview as premier-elect on state television, Magyar even called the broadcaster a “factory of lies” and vowed to “immediately suspend the false news service that is happening here.” Do you find these promises credible?

As a journalist, but also as a member of the public, I think you should always be skeptical about promises made during election campaigns. We’ve seen that they can always change. The incoming prime minister promised several times that they would ensure that nobody can ever build propaganda machinery like this again — that they would ensure the independence of the public broadcasters, and journalism in general.

I think it’s pretty clear that the supporters of the future governing party don’t want an Orbán regime 2.0. If they see the new government doing that, I think they will probably speak up.

During the campaign, Péter Magyar’s approach could be quite critical of independent outlets when they published stories that he didn’t like. He could even be quite aggressive in his rhetoric. I think to a certain extent, that’s fine. We are not here to make friends with politicians. There is an inherent tension in our relationship with whoever is in government. Our job is to find out what they want to hide from the public and for what reasons.

Hopefully we do have a system in which politicians won’t like journalism, but understand that we play a role in the democratic system. At this point, we will see what kind of actions they will take.