For the past few weeks I have been trying to figure out the new Hungarian government’s secret plan for the information ecosystem.
We are launching Capital Stacks of Journalism in Budapest soon, and I wanted to invite someone from around the government to sit politely through my excellent opening speech (it will be excellent, you heard it here first) and then tell the room what they are planning for the ecosystem. So, I needed to identify whoever had written the secret plan and get hold of it.
This has proved more difficult than I anticipated, largely because there does not appear to be a secret plan at all.
Hungary’s previous media system was heavily captured, centralised around government decisions, state directed advertising and all sorts of interference. Assuming that somewhere there was a document, a strategy, a person who knew what was going to happen next was usually the right thing to do.
So I called people in the know, who are close to the new structures and some of whom may eventually become part of them. They didn’t know either.
My initial reaction was mild irritation. How can you win an election and not already have Project 2026, including a flawlessly formatted 57-page media funding strategy?
Things are happening. Public-service media is being reorganised, and the new oversight body is being assembled. But outside public broadcasting, much of the architecture is still being worked out.
There may be stakeholder consultations. Decisions may be slow. Some will probably be sensible, others less so. There will be all sorts of clumsy processes, strange appointments and constant drama. All very tedious, inefficient and generally annoying.
Probably how democratic processes usually work. But after sixteen years of not that, I’m really not used to it.
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The state supplies the money, the audience allocates it
One mechanism survived the previous sixteen years, despite some late attempts to change it.
Across the whole system, 1.8 million taxpayers directed HUF 21.4 billion (€58.7 million) to 31,299 civil society organisations. Just like last year, a significant share went to media, journalism and the broader sector.
We screened all 31,299 recipients and identified 116 organisations with links to journalism, broadcasting, periodicals, journalism support or media education. Together they received around HUF 1,6 billion (€4,4 million), about 7.6% of every forint distributed through the civil 1% system.
Partizán was the largest civil-society recipient in the entire country, with HUF 576.9 million (€1,58 million) from 42,854 taxpayers. Telex came second with HUF 543.3 million (€1,48 million) from 35,319 people.
Since unused tokens have a tendency to burn a hole in my pocket exactly the same way unspent money does, I just had to build a dashboard.
It is in English, converts the figures into something comprehensible for people who do not instinctively think in hundreds of millions of forints, and lets you explore individual organisations, categories and the wider trends.
Now let me tell you why I like this mechanism, why I think this may have been its high-water mark, and what the next Hungarian media-funding system should learn from it.