We are exclusively publishing in four sequels a dossier on how the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and its leader and Prime Minister Janez Janša follow the media strategy of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in controlling the media and their political takeover. Today is the third part. We published the first and second parts on Monday and Tuesday.

We are publishing this research text by Lenart J. Kučić in cooperation with the Slovenian research portal podcrto.si, which systematically monitors events on the Slovenian media and political scene.

Last summer, the Hungarian media house TV2 Media bought the second-largest Slovenian commercial television, Planet TV, from the state-owned telecommunications operator Telecom Slovenia. TV2 Media in Hungary owns one of the two largest commercial televisions, TV2.

TV2 Media is owned by Hungarian investment fund Abraham Goldman, controlled by Hungarian financier József Vida, along with some other partners. Among them is reportedly the biggest Hungarian oligarch and media owner Lőrinc Mészáros.

Vida and Mészáros belong to a circle of businessmen close to the ruling Fidesz party and its president, Viktor Orbán. This circle dominates a large part of the media and most of the television market in Hungary. Their media is characterized by complete allegiance to Orbán’s policies, the spread of anti-immigrant and anti-Brussels propaganda, and attacks on Fidesz’s political opponents. This circle of people also includes Hungarian owners of companies in the SDS party media system: Nova24TV, the political weekly Demokracija, and a network of local online media, as we have shown in previous investigations.

This means that the acquisition of Planet TV has strengthened the regional influence of the Hungarian media model, which Hungary has expanded in recent years to several neighboring countries: Slovenia and Northern Macedonia and countries where the Hungarian minority lives (Slovakia and Romania). By taking over Planet TV, the possibility of influencing public opinion has also increased by the SDS, which is a political and ideological ally of Fidesz on the international scene. The media under the auspices of the SDS, which are owned by Hungarians, are characterized by complete loyalty to the party and its president Janez Janša, which we have already shown in last year’s investigations of the SDS media system.

In the first part of the investigation into the influence of the work of the Hungarian media on the policy of the SDS party, we showed that Viktor Orbán and Janez Janša had very similar views on the media policy. Both Orbán and Janša first took control of state television during their first government. When they found themselves in opposition, they both founded their party television – Orbán Hír TV and Janša Nova24TV. Both, with the help of their business connections, managed to establish an additional television that was in their favor – Orbán EchoTV, and Janša Planet TV, which was established as a media project of the SDS in 2012.

The Slovenian and Hungarian prime ministers also justified their media exploits with the same political rhetoric: how in Hungary, as in Slovenia, the allegedly strong ideological bias or hostility of the media towards the political right must be eliminated in every possible way. And that with new media laws, political staffing, taking over public media, and the establishment and financing of pro-government media.

The similarities in the actions of the two politicians do not end here. Janez Janša’s moves in the current government are very reminiscent of Viktor Orban’s moves after his 2010 re-election victory.

How Orbán subjugated most Hungarian televisions?

When Orbán secured a constitutional majority in parliament after a major victory in the April 2010 elections, he began to pursue the intention that his media reforms during the first government were not radical enough, we learned from Hungarian interlocutors.

His intentions to take over television were limited by the old Hungarian constitution, which prevented him, like all previous governments, from changing media legislation. Namely, the governments did not have the two-thirds parliamentary majority required by Article 61 of the Constitution to change media laws. However, when the parliamentary majority approved an amendment to the Constitution in July 2010 and amended Article 61 to include the right of citizens to “correct and adequate information on public affairs”, a legal basis was prepared for any future changes in media legislation.

What were the most important consequences of Orbán’s media policy?

First, it provided the legal basis for merging all public media (radio, television, and news agencies) as a single media company under the supervision of his Fidesz party. He then made sure that the new media regulators allowed such a merger, which would significantly change the attitude in the media market due to the size of the new media company. Also, regulators have played another important role: making it harder for media outlets that have criticized the government’s work while allowing loyal tycoons from the Fidesz circle to take over private media previously owned by foreign owners.

By the end of 2010, the government had passed several media laws without public debate. Among the key changes was the establishment of a new media and telecommunications regulator (NMHH) with broad powers (granting media licenses, sanctions for violations, approving takeovers between media companies …), which was subordinated to the governing policy, as its director appointed by the Prime Minister, and his term of office lasts as long as nine years (without limitation of the number of terms).

The management of the regulator is entrusted to individuals from the Fidesz circle. Fidesz MP Annamária Szalai took over the leadership of NMHH in 2010 and was replaced by Monika Karas, the legal representative of many Fidesz media, after her death in 2013.

In addition to establishing a new regulator, the government passed a law on media rights and duties in 2010, which allowed the government to regulate media content (the so-called Media Constitution), and a media law that introduced several new sanctions for media owners. The new regulator could, among other things, unilaterally assess whether journalistic announcements were “moral and balanced” and impose very high fines (up to 700,000 euros) and revoke the license or shut down the media. Under the new law, journalists (and the media) have in some cases lost the right to protect sources of information, making it even more difficult to detect possible irregularities involving government officials or pro-government oligarchs.

The political role of the new regulators became very clear in 2010 when two foreign media owners (Swiss Ringier and German Axel Springer) announced the merger of their media companies in Hungary. They decided to merge due to the effects of the global financial crisis and the impact of the Internet, which has seriously affected the business model of commercial media, as they have lost much of their advertising revenue. 

However, the regulator prevented the merger due to allegedly negative consequences for the competitiveness and pluralism of the media market. Ringier and Axel Springer, therefore, left the Hungarian media market in 2014, selling their shares to a Vides-influenced VCP fund (the regulator did not oppose this sale and subsequent merger). The companies were then transformed into the joint venture Mediaworks, which was taken over in 2016 by former Orban media adviser from the first government, Gábor Liszkay. At the time, Liszkay was the editor-in-chief of the right-wing daily Magyar Nemzet.

The government also allowed a special law to merge all the then public television services (M1, M2, and Duna TV), national radio stations, and national news agencies under a common roof called MTVA. The first director of MTVA became Csaba Fazekas, a former manager in the business system of Orbán’s ally Lajos Simiscka. He was appointed to this position by NMHH Director Annamária Szalai.

By merging all public media in Hungary, the production of content on MTVA was completely centralized, with more than a thousand experienced people fired without warning, and many influential and popular shows canceled overnight wrote Austrian journalist Paul Lendvai in a book on Orbán (Ciceron, 2020). Those who have criticized Orban and his policies in the past have lost their jobs, he added.

However, the television market was dominated by the two oldest Hungarian commercial televisions, TV2 and RTL Klub, which were owned by foreign owners and had much higher ratings than Fidesz’s media system. As a result, Orbán’s government began to put additional pressure on foreign media owners, who became less and less interested in the Hungarian media market due to new restrictive media laws, unfair competition from pro-government media, and the impending global economic crisis.

One of the key roles in this process was played by TV2, which took over Slovenian Planet TV last year.

Political takeover of TV2

TV2 is the first commercial television station in Hungary, founded in 1997 by the German media group ProSiebenSat1. They, along with some other foreign media companies, entered Hungary after the end of socialism because the media market was then completely open to foreign investors.

However, the situation in the media market began to change sharply after 2008. At that time, Hungary was first hit by the global financial crisis, which, among other things, seriously affected the revenues of media companies. This was followed by the first year of Orbán’s government, during which the governing policy began to change the media laws with which it put the public media under control and put pressure on foreign media owners who had been critical of the new government in the past. In the same period, the influence of social networks and internet portals began to increase, which gradually took over an increasing share of advertising revenues from traditional media.

This has caused a lot of uncertainty among foreign investors, explained Mérték Ágnes Urbán, a Hungarian researcher and director of the Media Monitoring Institute. Therefore, foreign media companies began to withdraw from Hungary and look for buyers for their media ownership.

Among them was ProSiebenSat1. For a while, they unsuccessfully searched for a buyer for TV2, and then in 2013, they left television to the former leading managers on TV2: Yvonne Dederick and Zsolta Simon. The takeover was presented as a managerial buyout, but it later turned out that the entire operation was led and financed by Orbán’s ally Lajos Simicska.

In 2015, Orbán and Simicska quarreled and became politically separated. Simicska began using his media to criticize Orban and his policies. As a result of the dispute with Simicski, Fidesz temporarily lost its oldest party television, Hír TV, which became extremely critical of Orbán and his government. But the Hungarian prime minister regained control of the media in a very short time. Among the media’s first acquisitions was TV2, which Dederick and Simon sold through a complex ownership structure to successful American film producer of Hungarian descent Andrew Vajna who produced films about Evita, Terminator, Rambo, and other action heroes. In this way, Simcska, who until then was the hidden owner of TV2, was expelled from the company.

After returning from America to Hungary, Vajna became very close to Fidesz because he had numerous benefits from their support, we learned from Hungarian interlocutors. In 2011, he took over several important positions in state film institutions and was awarded the only state concession to manage casinos in Budapest. Shortly after the takeover, TV2’s editorial policy also changed, becoming more sympathetic to the government and Fidesz than it had been under previous owners. But when Vajna died unexpectedly in early 2019, the takeover of TV2 was announced by Hungarian financier József Vida, who had not been active in the Hungarian media market until then, Ágnes Urbán told us.

The new owner of TV2 is the investment fund Abraham Goldman, which Vida manages together with some other partners, among whom our interlocutors mention the greatest Hungarian oligarch Lőrinc Mészáros, Orbán’s childhood friend, who became the biggest Hungarian media owner after Orban’s break with Simic.

In November 2018, a large part of the private media merged or founded by Fidesz entrepreneurs in 2010 merged in Hungary. Fourteen different owners donated their media ownership to the newly established Central European Press and Media Fund KESMA. Thus, a total of 476 television and radio programs, internet and print media, and numerous advertising agencies were donated to the fund, so KESMA became (with the consent of the Competition Agency and the media regulator NMHH) the largest media owner in the country, controlling a total of 43 percent of media revenues from advertising, calculated by Attila Bátorfy. The management of KESMA was first entrusted to Fidesz MP István Varga, then the media fund was taken over by Gábor Liszkay.

Fidesz’s oldest television, Hír TV, which was sold by Lajos Simicska to former associate and owner of pro-government Echo TV, Zsolt Nyerges, also became part of KESMA. The latter donated the television to KESMA.

The government of Viktor Orban thus conquered all public media in just one year after taking power in 2010. Besides, with the help of state advertising and loyal media oligarchs, it strengthened its private media pillar, which Orbán built with the help of loyal opposition businessmen. With the founding of KESMA and the entry of Vida on TV2 in 2019, the current Hungarian media model was formed in which politics directly controls the public media, and loyal businessmen associated with the Fidesz party private.

The owners of private media in Hungary are rewarded by politics with state advertising, which we described in more detail in the first investigation of the Hungarian media model. This has enabled the survival of many pro-government media outlets that would not be able to survive on the market on their own and finance their regional expansion, said Ágnes Urbán. Also, to maintain a ridiculous media market in which most media are completely dependent on direct or indirect state advertising.

Television in the hands of politics

Hungarian media researcher and analyst at Hungarian research media Átlátszó, Attila Bátorfy, told us that TV2 (40 percent) and RTL (38 percent) currently have the largest market share in television viewership, while the rest of the television shares the remaining 22 percent, of which the largest public television has a share.

All public televisions (M1, M2, M3, M4, regional Duna TV, and Duna World) are state-owned and indirectly controlled by TV2 and Hír TV and, to a lesser extent, ATV. The actual reach of pro-government television is difficult to calculate precisely due to a lack of data, Bátorfy explained. In an analysis of the Hungarian media market, the research group Atlo estimated that three-quarters of all televisions, which together reach 52 percent of the television audience, could be classified as pro-government media.

Pro-government media received as much as 80 percent of state money for advertising in 2018 (the state spent 230 million euros on advertising), and in 2019 the total value of state advertising increased to 265 million euros. For most pro-government media, state advertising is the largest or almost the only source of revenue, according to Atlo.

Only Viasat3 (which has a negligible market share, similar to Slovenian TV3) and RTL Klub, which is owned by Luxembourg’s RTL Group, remained independent.

RTL Klub is the second oldest commercial television in Hungary to start broadcasting in October 1997, just days after TV2. RTL Club is a typical commercial television that broadcasts mostly light and entertaining content, said Ágnes Urbán. However, RTL also broadcasts a news program that has very good ratings in Hungary. In the evening reports, they publish domestic and international news and investigative stories that are often critical of the Hungarian government. They also publish discoveries of independent (mostly online) research media that would never have reached a wider audience without the support of television. 

“The big difference is whether several thousand, maybe ten thousand people read research stories online or a million citizens watch them on television,” Agnes Urbán summed up the importance of the existence of the RTL Club. RTL is also the only national media outlet that reaches the elderly population and residents of rural areas, and to which Fidesz addresses through the network of local media and state RTV.

A similar role in Slovenia is played by the largest commercial television Pop TV, which, like RTL in Hungary, prepares an informative program in which they are often critical of the government and politicians.

Is it possible to establish such a media system in Slovenia, where one ruling political party (SDS) controls public and several private televisions, with which it reaches the majority of television viewers? About that in the next sequel!

Tomorrow at 11 a.m, we are bringing you the last fourth sequel of the dossier!