The ever powerful liberal mainstream media that is no longer liberal, mainstream or particularly powerful

The “liberal mainstream media bias” critique has lost its explanatory power because the world that produced it has dissolved.

Ringier, the Swiss publishing giant, is selling its Hungarian portfolio to Indamedia, a media group with ties to the government so close they might as well file a joint tax declaration. The transaction is taking place about 150 days before our next national election.

This matters because Ringier publishes Blikk, Hungary’s most popular tabloid. Like many tabloids, Blikk isn’t explicitly political, which is exactly what makes it politically instrumental. It reaches a massive audience, many of them undecided voters who are not otherwise deeply engaged with politics.

The outlet had recently brought in respected editors from serious journalism backgrounds. Those hires are now leaving. The previous editor, whose sensibilities are more aligned with the new ownership, is returning.

The outlines follow Hungary’s well-worn playbook of media capture through strategic acquisition, but there is an additional layer this time: business logic. Unlike much of Hungary’s captured media ecosystem, which survives almost entirely on state advertising and politically motivated spending, the combined Blikk–Index portfolio is large enough to be commercially viable on its own.

Index, also published by Indamedia, was captured in 2020. Its coverage shifted noticeably, reliably echoing the government line, but it never descended into the kind of frothing partisanship that defines other state-aligned outlets. It remained large, broadly accessible, and attractive to market advertisers. Add Blikk to that, and you get a property that could weather a regime change.

This is not just about controlling coverage before an election. It looks like strategic asset allocation for post-regime scenarios. If Fidesz loses, much of the captured media empire will collapse once the political money stops flowing. But a few assets (TV2 Group, the Index–Blikk combination) are substantial enough to survive as mass platforms.

In that sense, this deal is both an attempt to shape the political narrative ahead of the election and a hedge against whatever comes after.

If we zoom out, it’s worth looking at how the media landscape is shifting elsewhere too. Some of these changes might resemble Hungary’s at first glance in their political implications, though the motivations and mechanisms are different. In several major markets, we’re seeing a quiet but visible rightward drift in ownership and editorial control, not always driven by ideology alone, but rarely free of it.

In the United States, CBS is now under the editorial influence of Bari Weiss and The Free Press. Jeff Bezos, once the patron saint of the yacht industry and benevolent non-interference at The Washington Post, has stepped in to pull the paper’s Kamala Harris endorsement and to take a more active hand in shaping its direction. Across the Atlantic, hedge-fund billionaire Paul Marshall has assembled a modest but growing media portfolio built around right-of-centre discourse, taking a stake in The Spectator, launching the more radical GB News, and backing UnHerd, which has become a kind of salon for heterodox, right leaning centrism and polite contrarians.

It may be tempting to draw a straight line between these developments and the kind of media capture we’ve seen in Hungary over the past fifteen years. But I think the scale, the mechanisms, and even the motivations are profoundly different.

Over the past decade and a half, the Fidesz government and its allied business network have absorbed, directly or indirectly, an extraordinary share of the media market. This wasn’t a single takeover or even a series of opportunistic acquisitions. It was an orchestrated, centrally managed project in which political actors, state regulators, and government-friendly financiers moved in concert. It was (and remains) a system designed, sanctioned, and executed from the very top.

That kind of scale and coordination simply doesn’t exist in the United States or the United Kingdom, even if people sometimes use the same vocabulary of “capture” or “takeover”. The difference is both quantitative and qualitative. Hungary’s is a near-total ecosystem realignment. The American and British examples are better understood as a series of ideological and commercial adjustments within otherwise pluralistic markets.

In the U.S. and U.K., there are political motives, of course. Some of the new owners on the right have clear ideological leanings; others are opportunists, reading the room and recognising that being on friendly terms with a future administration or with a growing audience segment might simply be good business. But these are entrepreneurial calculations, not state-orchestrated strategies. I don’t think there is a MAGA cabinet member quietly coordinating takeovers, no White House-linked bank providing soft loans to acquire a tabloid, no regulatory fast track for “nationally important” publishers.

Both in the U.S. and the U.K., there is, quite simply, a large centre-right public that has felt underserved by legacy institutions. For those who found Fox (Newsmax, etc.) too fringe and partisan and The New York Times too liberal and condescending, there wasn’t much in between. Outlets like The Free Press, or even the retooled CBS under Bari Weiss’s influence, are trying to inhabit that space: recognisably conservative in temperament but not quite populist or conspiratorial in tone.

And whether one likes that development or not, it’s not unreasonable. Expecting centre-right audiences to exist without platforms that reflect their worldview is neither realistic nor particularly liberal.