Hungary’s Public Broadcaster Goes Dark, Confessing ‘Years of Lies’ | Balkan Insight

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Hungary’s Public Broadcaster Goes Dark, Confessing ‘Years of Lies’

The state broadcaster abruptly halted news shows, admitting it ‘became a platform for spreading hatred and lies’ under Viktor Orban’s previous government and vowing to change.<br>It took Hungary’s new government six weeks to deliver on one of its key campaign promises: to suspend news broadcasting on public media, long seen by critics as a propaganda outlet of the previous government of Viktor Orban.

On Tuesday, at 4 p.m., without warning, screens showing M1, the main news channel of the public television service, went dark. The only thing that could be seen was a plain piece of text that apologised for the “hatred and lies” of the past years, promised credible and independent news coverage in future, and asked for patience from viewers. Public radio went on playing classical music without news segments, while the public broadcaster’s online news site also went blank.

Prime Minister Peter Magyar welcomed the suspension of the news service. “It is a historic day. They lied day and night. Now it has come to an end,” Magyar commented on Facebook.

But former prime minister Orban was not impressed. “Another step toward Tisza’s authoritarianism,” posted the five-times prime minister who ruled for 16 years and did not receive one critical question on state television in the last decade.

The decision to suspend news broadcasts may seem to have come out of the blue but followed a strict legal process.

“I was also surprised,” Gabor Polyak, professor of media law and policy at Budapest’s ELTE University, told BIRN.

“But before the new media law was passed, and the new management was appointed, this would not have been possible.”

The Tisza party, which won the April 12 elections with a landslide, recently passed a new media law that paves the way for restructuring the public media. New interim leaders overseeing the public television, public radio and the online news service were only appointed on Tuesday and wasted no time.

Layoffs of editors and anchors seen as responsible for promoting Orban’s Fidesz party’s propaganda over the past years immediately started, followed by the suspension news broadcasting.

Regular programmes resumed on Tuesday evening with iconic Hungarian films, but news broadcasting remains suspended for now.

“The black screen symbolises the end of an era,” the public broadcaster’s statement read. “Over the past years, the public broadcaster has come under the influence of political power and lost its most important function: providing the public with credible and objective information. Instead, it became a platform for spreading hatred and lies. From this moment on, that will change.”

“This was like a targeted operation,” media expert Polyak said. “All other programmes continue, only the news blocks have been suspended. But I don’t think this can last longer than a week or two”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar speaks to media at the NATO summit in Ankara, 8 July 2026. Photo: EPA/NECATI SAVAS.

The closest recent precedent to Tuesday’s dramatic events came in Poland. In December 2023, after Donald Tusk’s government came to power, it briefly took the country’s main public news channels off air while replacing the management of state broadcaster TVP. The state broadcaster which had been widely criticised for acting as a mouthpiece for the previous Law and Justice (PiS) government.

For viewers, the change was abrupt: news channel TVP Info disappeared from the air, regular news bulletins were suspended, and by the following evening a new flagship news programme had replaced the old one. Unlike in Hungary, however, where Tisza’s parliamentary supermajority allowed it to rewrite the legal framework before taking control of the broadcaster, Tusk’s administration had to navigate a deeply contested institutional and legal landscape.

Polyak sees the suspension of the Hungarian news broadcasts as a highly symbolic move – typical of the current government, to frame a narrative – but the real challenge is repositioning the public broadcaster and restoring its credibility.

“Overall, the viewing figures of the public media, at around 10 per cent, are not bad,” Polyak added, but the news channel, M1, with its tiny 2-3 per cent market share, is not a success story.

Analysts say the state media, with its five channels and more than 2,000 employees, is overstaffed and could be streamlined to save money. It currently receives 154 billion forints (422 million euros) in annual funding, a figure expected to be reduced.

Orban’s loudhailer

Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Brussels, January 2026. Photo: EPA/Olivier Matthys.

Since the Fidesz party came to power in 2010, the state media has effectively acted as a government mouthpiece, featuring pro-government ‘experts’ promoting conspiracy theories while openly fuelling...