Quick Guide to the Central-Eastern European Media Sphere

These issues are compounded by the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation, growing news fatigue, and a broader, troubling loss of trust in journalism. However, the situation in the V4 countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) presents unique challenges that threaten press freedom even further. From political pressures on independent media to shrinking ad revenues and government-aligned media consolidation, the free press in Central and Eastern Europe is facing an uphill battle. While it is simple to focus solely on the negative, there are pockets of innovation and hope. Several media outlets across the region are experimenting with new models of digital journalism, audience engagement, and investigative reporting, offering a glimmer of light in a troubled media environment. In this article, I will explore both the critical challenges and these emerging bright spots that demonstrate the resilience and adaptability of journalism in the V4 region.

I spent over two decades working in Hungary at leading independent media outlets, and more recently, I have been involved with the management of Denník N, a prominent Slovak independent news organization.  Denník N is part of a regional media family that includes Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian-language news portals and newspapers.

In both Slovakia and Hungary, government leaders often view the media as either a mouthpiece for propaganda or a formidable opponent. In Hungary, nearly 15 years of Viktor Orbán’s administration have left the independent media landscape drastically diminished. Meanwhile, in Slovakia, the return of Prime Minister Robert Fico has raised concerns, especially with his swift takeover of public service media and his frequent attacks when he labels specific newspapers and journalists as enemies. This is particularly alarming in a country still reeling from the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová just a few years ago.

First challenge: when political power influences or dominates the media field

State capture of the media and the implementation of new, distorting laws were first executed in the region by Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán implemented the process in an advanced and highly effective manner. Other political leaders in the region have followed, or are currently following, in his footsteps, attempting to replicate his methods.

Media ownership by politically biased institutions and oligarchs is now a feature of all V4 countries to some extent. In Slovakia, the Penta group, which controls several influential media outlets, has close ties to the populist government. In Poland, there are traces of the previous PiS government’s media control, for example, much of the regional media is owned by a state-owned company, the Polish state oil company PKN Orlen. Meanwhile, in Hungary, a vast network of online, broadcast, and print media operates as a propaganda machine serving political interests.

However, this was not always the case.

I began my career as a journalist in Hungary in 2002, and I vividly remember when the country ranked at the top of the Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom list. In 2006, for instance, Hungary was ranked tenth out of 170 countries. At that time, when I asked questions to high-ranking representatives of authorities, hospitals, political parties, or ministries, they responded. However, this has completely changed. Today, in-depth answers and interviews with non-governmental news outlets are rare. Parallel to these worrying developments, Hungary’s ranking in the press freedom index has dropped dramatically. By 2024, Hungary ranked 67th, comparable to Sierra Leone, and second-to-last among European Union countries.

The main driver behind this steep decline is state capture, a phenomenon frequently highlighted by independent organizations concerned about press freedom. State capture in the media occurs when governments build their own media ecosystems and take over once-independent outlets through political or business interests. I experienced this firsthand in 2020, when the management of Index, Hungary’s leading quality news outlet where I had worked for 18 years, fired the Editor-in-Chief. As his Deputy, I resigned the next day, alongside more than 90 colleagues, as it became clear we could no longer maintain independent journalism there. We experienced firsthand how swiftly politics can influence our lives and the information sources of the public. This is the core problem with state capture: it makes access to factual, impartial information increasingly difficult for citizens.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán realized sometime in the 2000s that controlling the media was key to his political strategy. He went beyond distorting public service media into a government propaganda tool, spending this year 360 million euros of taxpayers’ money for this purpose. His ambitions extended further, resulting in a fractured Hungarian media landscape: the majority of outlets now align with the ruling Fidesz party, while a minority remain independent.

One of the tools used to control the media and shape public opinion was the creation of the KESMA (Central European Press and Media Foundation) organization in 2018, which the government declared a matter of “national strategic interest.” KESMA, technically a foundation, owns more than 500 media outlets—including TV channels, radio stations, online news sites, tabloids, and all county dailies. Such media concentration has not been seen in Europe since the communist era. The scale and centralization of KESMA’s control is unprecedented on the continent and unimaginable in the Western world.

KESMA, while technically being an independent nonprofit foundation, has been run by Orbán loyalists since its establishment. Its massive media portfolio was gifted by pro-government businessmen as charitable donations. Although the assets were donated, the corresponding transactions are estimated to be worth around 90 million euros.

An example of this centralization can be seen when all the country dailies published identical content during the Prime Minister’s 2019 Christmas interview, illustrating the foundation’s tight grip on Hungary’s regional media landscape.

The pro-government media conglomerate is highly organized and has virtually unlimited resources, in stark contrast to the critical media sphere, which operates mostly online. The independent outlets are underfunded, fragmented, and often compete with one another, all while being hit by multiple economic crises.

Beyond media ownership, new laws have significantly shaped the free press in Hungary. The country leads the way in this regard. With Fidesz holding a constitutional two-thirds majority in Parliament, they can pass any law impacting the media landscape. In 2010, a new media law was passed to restructure public service media, transforming it into a platform that primarily serves Fidesz, with little regard for public service.

In 2024, the Protection of National Sovereignty Act established a so-called Sovereignty Protection Office (SPO), ostensibly aimed at countering foreign influence in Hungarian elections. The law was drafted in such a way, however, that it could also be used to target independent media outlets. This legal tool, which rapidly developed, now hangs over the press like a sword of Damocles, enabling the ruling party to restrict democratic freedoms in various ways. For instance, the investigative outlet Átlátszó is already under investigation, and the SPO is reportedly looking to cooperate with the Hungarian National Bank to monitor selected banking transactions at will.

Second challenge: when big tech dominates and influences the media field

In the last 10-15 years, in an accelerating process, very large platforms like Google, Meta, and X have come to dominate the digital advertising market and control how news is distributed and consumed. Media companies are vulnerable to algorithms that operate in a largely non-transparent way, making revenues and turnover unpredictable.

While over the past decade and a half more advertising money has been directed toward these platforms, making them dominant in the distribution of online content, the EU Copyright Directive provided some hope to the media industry by introducing neighboring rights remuneration. In February 2022, Google decided to stop showing snippets (short summaries, previews, images) of Czech news articles in its search results in response to the European Union’s Copyright Directive, which had been transposed into Czech law. The directive aimed to ensure that news publishers are fairly compensated for the use of their content by online platforms, as these platforms generate huge revenues thanks to the work of publishers, hardworking journalists, and content creators. Any article summary read on Google’s search page actually harms publishers financially because the reader does not visit their site, but rather stays on search engines or social networking sites. There is no direct link to the media outlet, no views, no clicks, and therefore no advertising revenue. A legislative solution was necessary, but its implementation has been fraught with tension and varied from country to country in the region. In some countries, there have been attempts to bring publishers together, but either individual business interests or, in many cases, political interests (as seen in Slovakia, Hungary, or Poland) have led to individual deals between publishers and these very large, influential platforms.

The simplified question in these negotiations is always: how much should tech platforms pay news publishers for using their content to generate revenue?

In a unique move in Czechia, 17 leading media companies joined forces to try and reach a compromise solution through joint rights management, but the attempt failed. The associations of Czech publishers pointed out that Meta and Google’s decision was “one-sided and was made with minimal effort to establish meaningful dialogue with the publisher associations representing the vast majority of online news and magazine content in the Czech Republic.”

The challenge persists. The trend is for publishers to negotiate individual deals with large platforms to get some money for licensing their content, but often much less than what they are estimated to deserve. If publishers are unwilling to settle, the platforms use their dominance to shut down important services, as seen in Czechia, resulting in reduced visibility for news pieces, lower traffic, and serious revenue losses.

Third challenge: When misinformation and disinformation infiltrate the media field and distort the views of the audiences

“Yes, I’m alive. I never thought I’d have to post this on the Internet. Someone is sending out a fake copy of my website on behalf of my spokesperson with a message about my death,” wrote Czech President Petr Pavel shortly before the last Czech elections.

But this is just one of countless examples where either an organization or a branch of the political elite, whether inside or outside a country, spreads fake news to demonstrate power or create confusion within smaller or larger communities. Sometimes it concerns internal or external politics; in other cases, it involves health issues. As a Globsec report pointed out last year, “the impact of health-related disinformation shared during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to distrust towards pharmaceutical companies, health organizations, and vaccinations. Approximately 37 percent of the CEE region believe that COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of premature death, and 56 percent suspect pharmaceutical companies of concealing effective treatments for diseases like COVID-19 and cancer for profit.”

Misinformation in our region is a growing challenge, exacerbated by political polarization, foreign influence, and digital platforms. External actors, especially from Russia, have been implicated in spreading disinformation to destabilize the region, a trend that intensified following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

We can combat this phenomenon through regulatory reforms, but also by returning to the roots of independent journalism: strengthening media literacy, enhancing fact-checking, carefully using sources, and educating the public—especially the vulnerable younger generations—about the nature of fake news.

And the promising regional developments that give cause for optimism

Despite the challenges detailed above (and many more), there are also promising and hopeful signs in the free media space in the region, with successful new projects emerging and tens of thousands of readers realizing over the last decade that if they want to consume free, factual, independent information, they need to contribute financially by paying a few euros a month for content—about the same as two or three specialty coffees. They need to understand that they need to contribute financially not just at newsstands on the street, but also online.

Denník N, the independent news outlet where I work, now has 70,000 subscribers in Slovakia, a country of 5 million people. In terms of ratio to population, this is slightly larger than the New York Times’ subscriber base in the United States (no brag, but yes, brag).

In Hungary, independent media outlets like 444.hu, Telex.hu, Válasz.hu, and the investigative journalism center Direkt36 also survive on reader donations or subscriptions. Additionally, in Hungary, the system-critical YouTube channel Partizán received just over a million euros from nearly 40,000 viewers in 2024 from 1% tax donations. In Slovakia, Michal Kovačič raised more than 500 thousand euros in two days for his new online television project. Michal Kovačič, a talk show host, left Markíza TV earlier this year after discussing political influence on the broadcaster during a live broadcast.

Moreover, if a government is not hostile to free media, it can help the development of the media space by fostering traditional journalistic values such as transparency, independence, accuracy, and correctness through well-targeted regulation. As the Reuters Institute’s Free Media Country Report pointed out, in the Czech Republic, “the amendment to the Act on Conflict of Interests has finally forced the ex-Prime Minister, Andrej Babiš, to sell the media assets that had been ‘parked’ in his trust fund since 2017.”

There is no point in dreaming or waiting for independent media to return to a ‘normal’ state that never truly existed. Instead, the focus should be on whether these transformed arenas and inspirational initiatives can gain momentum, strengthen, and eventually become dominant.