The situation of media freedom, the current problems of media regulation in Hungary has been a constant issue of the European agenda since 2010. Despite the fierce criticism of domestic, European and international organizations, neither the legal framework nor the direction of media policy steps changed. The media policy measures of recent years gradually led to an extensive transformation of the media system. The process is based on three contiguous pillars. These are undermining the independence of the supervisory bodies of private and public media, manipulating access to the resources necessary for their activity in the media market, and manipulating the information environment by controlling the access to public information and the political agenda. This paper highlights the communication and funding roles of state advertising and campaigning and the legal issues they raise. State advertising should by no means favour certain market players unfoundedly, because in such cases they can be considered as prohibited state aid in the terms of the European law. The practice of placing state advertisements in Hungary does not meet the normal market conditions. These advertisements are also problematic from the point of view of media law classification, however the Hungarian media authority always applies the law in favour of the government. This behaviour can also be found in the practice of assessing media concentrations. The misuse of public finance and the authorities’ biased decisions together resulted in the largest media concentration in Europe at the end of 2018.
The study is based on data from a representative survey conducted in Hungary in 2020, which examined the public’s consumption of political and public information. Using the survey data, the authors attempt to map the consumption patterns of the Hungarian audience, with a special focus on the relationship between party preferences and the consumption of the various news sources with different ideological backgrounds. The research aims to better understand the phenomenon of polarisation, which is increasingly observed on both the supply and demand sides of the Hungarian news media. The focus of the study is to examine news consumption patterns in Hungary and the relationship between political polarisation and news consumption. The authors analysed the prevalence of information bubbles in the Hungarian public sphere, where consumers are only exposed to the views of one political side without being confronted with information or opinions that differ. Particular attention is paid to a special category of the Hungarian media system, the grey-zone media; they might seem to contribute greatly to the pluralism of the media system, but they are, in fact, strongly politically dependent. In addition to the identified news consumption patterns, the study aims to shed light on the importance and problematic nature of this grey-zone media category and to reveal how deeply the Hungarian public is actually dependent on the government.
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