Public media is not all about news

Hungary’s captured public broadcaster has gone dark. Rebuilding it should mean strengthening the information ecosystem, not recreating the old news machine.

I’ve known Alinda Veiszer for probably more than a decade, though I can’t remember where or how we first met. What I am absolutely certain of is that within five minutes we were talking about public service media, because that is just who she is. Working anywhere near Hungary’s information ecosystem during the 16 years of Fidesz rule made many people disillusioned, exhausted, or aggressively pragmatic. Alinda had every reason to join them. She had very direct personal experience with the uglier side of the system. And yet she stuck to her convictions with a consistency that was 99% inspiring and, for cynics like me, maybe 1% annoying.

After being pushed off screen, she did not disappear. Instead, she built a successful audience-funded interview show on Patreon: long-form, public-interest conversations with some of Hungary’s most important cultural figures, from across the political spectrum, paid for by a loyal community of viewers. This is exactly the sort of thing that sounds impossible in theory and then, annoyingly, works when someone actually believes in it. Now that Hungary has to decide what to do with the ruins of a public media system controlled with an iron fist until only a few months ago, I asked her to write about what should come next. Yes, this is a very Hungary-focused piece, but I hope it will also be relevant for the 90% of you who are not here for our Hungary coverage, but can still appreciate the semi-historic moment the Hungarian information ecosystem is currently living through.

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At 4pm on Tuesday, 7 July, the news channel of Hungarian public media, which many had, with good reason, taken to calling state media, announced that a caretaker leadership had taken over the institution. Then the broadcast was cut, and a caption appeared on the screen:

“Public media cannot lie. We apologise for having done exactly that for many years. Public media is now being transformed so that it can be independent and credible in the future. The news service is temporarily suspended. Stay with us.”

The screen stayed dark until 19:56 (a nod to Hungary’s crushed anti-communist revolution of 1956, seventy years old this autumn) when the broadcast resumed with The Witness, Péter Bacsó’s 1969 satire of the show-trial era. It is basically the movie version of Marx’s “Why this course of history? So that humanity should part with its past cheerfully.”

It was the appropriate choice.

In parliament, meanwhile, the freshly elected MP Andrea Rost, the world-famous soprano, announced that the news channel’s broadcast had ceased. MPs of the new governing party received the news with a standing ovation.

I will not pretend the gesture left me cold. My own time at the institution ended in ridiculous disciplinary hearings and attempts at censorship. Many colleagues did not get even that much; the newly entrenched power removed them immediately. By a strange twist of fate, all this happened exactly fifteen years ago, to the day. The authoritarian regime took precisely fifteen years from the lives of people who believed in the ethos of public service media and wanted to build it.

One could dismiss all of this as political theatre. But while the screen was dark, Hungarian social media filled with civilians and journalists posting the sins public media had committed against them over the years. Some had been accused of common crimes, some of treason. The fact-checking site Lakmusz posted the seven lies public media told during the election campaign. Something close to a society-wide consensus has formed behind renewing Hungarian public media.

But not quite a full consensus.

Because plenty of people are arguing there is no need for public service media at all, the state should simply distribute the money among other newsrooms. I disagree. Though I share the view that restarting it in its current form would be pointless.

So how should it be restarted, in a few days or a few months?

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The first task is not more news

Most debates about public media begin with news. Should the public broadcaster have a news service? Who appoints the editor-in-chief? How can it be balanced? What should happen during election campaigns?

These are important questions, but I am not sure the best answer is to rebuild a large, centralized public news operation as quickly as possible.

Over the past few years, Hungary has developed a surprisingly rich independent journalism scene. Investigative outlets, newsletters, podcasts, video channels, long-form sites, fact-checkers, local publications, documentary makers, and small editorial teams have done extraordinary work. They built audiences without state support, earned trust without institutional protection and produced public-interest journalism in an environment often designed to make that work harder.

That capacity is now one of the most valuable parts of Hungarian public life. It should not be weakened in the name of rebuilding public service media.

Any political opening creates movement. People who spent years working outside captured institutions will understandably be invited into government, public bodies, regulatory agencies, cultural institutions, and perhaps the new public media itself. Some of this is inevitable and healthy. A country that wants to govern differently needs people with expertise, credibility, and a working relationship with reality.

But scale matters. If the rebuilding of public media becomes a large-scale attempt to recreate a full news production machine from scratch, it could pull talent, attention, and resources away from the very independent ecosystem that kept public-interest journalism alive when public media failed.

So perhaps the first question should be how public media can make the best existing journalism more visible, accessible, and useful to the public.

A rebuilt public media could become a public-interest curator, commissioner, and syndication partner. It could buy rights, license content, co-produce programs, and build formats around work already being done by independent providers.

That could mean co-productions with smaller editorial teams that could never finance certain formats alone. It could mean commissioning documentaries, explanatory series, children’s programming, cultural formats (more on culture and children’s programming in a moment), or public-interest projects. It could mean giving visibility to work that otherwise reaches only a narrow audience.

Public media could purchase editorial products, formats, expertise, and distribution rights because they serve a public need. Done transparently, with clear rules and open criteria, this could support the market while respecting the independence of the organizations producing the work.

This would require serious safeguards: open calls, independent boards, transparent contracts, published evaluation criteria, conflict-of-interest rules, and protections against political interference. Public media could become an anchor institution in a pluralistic ecosystem rather than a whale sitting on top of it. Not as a ministry of truth or a grant machine for friendly editors, but as one content-producing and commissioning organization working transparently with others on projects that have clear public value.

The result could be better for everyone. Public media would immediately be able to offer a wider range of credible news and current-affairs content than it could produce alone. Independent providers would gain revenue, reach, and recognition without being absorbed. Audiences would get a single public window into a broader information ecosystem, while still being directed back to the original outlets when they want to go deeper.

A new public media could make the entire news ecosystem legible.

Its job should be to summarize, contextualize, credit, compensate, and point audiences back to the original work. It should help citizens understand what independent newsrooms, researchers, courts, civil society organizations, and public institutions have already established.

The first public-service function of a rebuilt Hungarian public media should therefore not be institutional self-restoration, it should be ecosystem restoration. The point is not to manufacture consensus, but to rebuild enough common factual ground that disagreement can become meaningful again.

The real opportunity is culture

Public media is not only news, in fact, some of its most important work should not be news at all. This is where I think the greatest missed opportunity lies.

Hungarian culture did not disappear during the years of authoritarian politics, quite the opposite. Theater, film, literature, music, comedy, independent video, and online culture found ways to survive and often to flourish. Artists responded to political pressure not only with explicit criticism, but with aesthetic invention. Some of the most interesting Hungarian public life moved into clubs, small theaters, YouTube channels, podcasts, book festivals, classrooms, and scenes that public media often ignored.

The tragedy is that much of this was barely recorded, amplified, or preserved by the institution that had the resources to do so. Public media sat on equipment, archives, studios, distribution, and public money while culture walked past it.

A 21st-century public media should not imagine culture from leather chairs and committee rooms. It should go where culture already happens. It should notice the young musicians, independent theater groups, filmmakers, writers, animators, stand-up comedians, documentary makers, local creators, and educators who already have audiences or deserve them.

It should produce ambitious cultural programming. It should finance films and series that commercial television will never make because the market is too small. It should create a second window for filmmakers and producers who cannot rely only on the national film-funding system. It should commission documentaries, alternative films, children’s animation, literary adaptations, modern talk shows, educational reality formats, and yes, even entertainment.

There is no law of nature saying public media has to be boring. If there is, it should be repealed immediately.

Children and young audiences were abandoned

One of the greatest failures of Hungarian public media was its indifference to young audiences.

Children did not get modern news designed for them, comparable to what German children receive through formats like logo.de. Young adults were not addressed in the places where they actually spend time, in the way funk.net tries to reach younger German audiences. Hungary did not build contemporary versions of the children’s and youth formats older generations still remember.

If public media has any future, it must take children and young people seriously as citizens, not merely as future voters or current screen addicts to be complained about at conferences.

This means age-appropriate news, explainers, animations. It means formats native to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, podcasts, and whatever platform will be invented next Tuesday. It means educational entertainment that does not feel like punishment. And most of all, it means listening to young people before designing content for them.

Public media should help create shared knowledge across generations, instead of the divisions it sowed for the last 16 years. This has to start with formats that respect the intelligence of children and the media habits of young adults.

Open the archives

A future public media also has a simple, urgent obligation: open the archives.

Hungarian citizens helped pay for decades of public-media production. Historians, teachers, students, journalists, filmmakers, families, and ordinary citizens should be able to access that material in a usable 21st-century system.

Not through a theoretically available but practically unusable archive that is in place now. Not through terminals that feel like they were designed by someone who considered user experience a Western conspiracy. A real archive: searchable, accessible, rights-cleared where possible, and designed for public use.

This is not a side issue, archives are part of democratic memory. A society cannot face its past if its publicly funded memory is locked away, poorly indexed, or available only to specialists with heroic patience.

Public media should go to the public

There is another word in public media that deserves more attention: public.

A rebuilt institution cannot only broadcast from Budapest and hope society heals itself. It has to create forms of participation, listen offline as well as online. It has to reach people who do not think of themselves as active citizens, who do not attend public forums, who do not fill out consultation forms, and who are rarely asked what they need except during election campaigns.

This could mean local forums, traveling editorial projects, partnerships with schools, libraries, municipalities, civil society groups, and creators. It could mean formats built around social problems, not as charity television, but as serious public-interest programming. It could mean using games, simulations, workshops, and community reporting to bring different social groups into contact with one another.

Hungary does not need public media that speaks down to the poor, the rural, the religious, the Roma, the elderly, the young, or anyone else. It needs public media that hears them and responds to their information needs.

This is easy to say and very hard to do. But if public media is not willing to do the hard parts, then why rebuild it at all?

The apology was only the beginning

The conclusion is only this: we need reckoning, synthesis, and a Hungarian public media rethought for the 21st century. One that finally works not for division but for unity. Even in small steps, slowly, a great deal can be achieved.

The screen going dark was historic. But darkness is the easy part, building something worth watching, trusting, and using will be much harder.

And if we, the middle-aged, are largely past saving, think of the future: children and young adults, who may still be open to a reality with some shared facts, knowledge and perhaps even values, and who may yet build a better country because of us. We only have to help.