Diminishing returns on media capture
Hungary just ran the most expensive experiment in media capture in EU history. The results were not what the experimenters hoped for.
I spent election night at a watch party where a small but vocal faction (I’ll admit I was among them) kept lobbying to switch over to the pro-government channels. The programming there was, let’s say, instructive. People who had spent sixteen years telling Hungarians what counted as reality were now receiving some new information on the subject. It was not a gracious evening for them. I am trying to be a bigger person about this, though I am not fully succeeding.
Tisza had the broadest electoral victory in the brief history of Hungarian democracy. There are many reasons why that happened: economic mismanagement, corruption, arrogance, the moral collapse after the clemency scandal, the general decay that sets in when a political system stops receiving honest feedback, and a broader international dynamic in which voters seem increasingly willing to punish incumbents. But most of you are not here for my comprehensive theory of Hungarian electoral behavior.
I do think part of the story has to do with the structure of the information ecosystem and how that structure changes the value of media capture. That seems worth exploring here because it is, at heart, a media-and-money question, which is the only kind we pretend to have authority over.
It is about how political actors convert resources into attention, attention into influence and power. It is about what happens when a governing party spends 15 years building an enormous captured media system, only to discover that the information environment underneath it is shifting in ways that make that investment less effective than it used to be.
So I want to spend this edition on that narrower point: not on every reason Orbán lost, and not on what Tisza’s victory will mean for the Hungarian media landscape, which we already touched on last week, but on why structural changes in the information ecosystem may have made media capture a weaker political technology than it once was.
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Viktor Orban’s empire of attention
Over the past sixteen years, Fidesz built a remarkably sophisticated machine for dominating the information ecosystem, and it did so in roughly three layers.
The first layer was interference on the advertising market. This is the part we have covered before, with extensive evidence for both the scale of it and the damage it caused. The Hungarian state remained one of the largest advertisers in the country and consistently directed spending toward loyal outlets while starving independent or merely insufficiently obedient ones. Most private advertisers, especially those operating in heavily regulated sectors, drew the obvious conclusion and followed suit. The result was a media market in which it became extremely difficult to run a non-aligned business sustainably. Weakening outlets economically made them easier to intimidate, marginalize, and, eventually, to acquire by government-friendly businessmen.
The second layer was capture and consolidation. Once enough of the market had been distorted, ownership could be consolidated into an enormous pro-government portfolio of newspapers, radio stations, television channels, online outlets and local titles. By the late 2010s, the government and its allies had reached critical institutional mass through the Central European Press and Media Foundation and other properties. This mattered especially outside Budapest, where old consumption patterns held longer and where the offline dominance of aligned media remained particularly strong.
The third layer was adaptation to the platform age. And here, in a coldly technical sense, one has to acknowledge the innovation. Fidesz understood earlier than many of its critics that owning newspapers, radio stations and television studios, while still useful, was no longer enough in a platform-mediated information environment. Attention was moving elsewhere, into platforms that were too big and too unruly to capture with the same methods they had used so effectively against Hungarian media. The governing camp did not abandon its captured institutional empire; it built a second system on top of it. This newer system crystallized mostly around the Megafon Incubator Center that relied on platform-native voices, pro-government influencers and heavily amplified low-grade political content designed less to persuade than to saturate. Censorship by noise, if you will.
The point of this model was not primarily to win elegant intellectual arguments. Much of the content was too crude, too aggressive and too transparently instrumental for that. Its function was to flood newsfeeds, reward loyal messengers, smear opponents, intimidate critics and make participation in public discourse feel exhausting, ugly and sometimes personally risky. If this was the discourse on offer, many sane people would simply decide they wanted less of it.
They spent enormous sums of money amplifying these voices. In the first nine months of 2025 alone, government-affiliated actors accounted for 87 percent of the HUF 4.1 billion (EUR 10.6 million) spent on Google and Meta ads in Hungary. That is an extraordinary resource advantage, and it helps explain why this strategy worked for as long as it did. The ruling camp was able to turn money into platform reach at a scale no opponents could even begin to match.
Fidesz built a system that could shape institutional distribution, dominate offline visibility, and carpet-bomb platform feeds with aligned messages. It promoted government narratives, distorted public discourse and raised the cost of dissent. For a while, this machine worked exceptionally well.