Part I — Situation overview

On 19 August 2026 three mutually independent operations took place in the public media within a single day. The interim management of Duna Médiaszolgáltató terminated with immediate effect the contracts concluded by the previous management with New Land Media and Lounge Design — the two production companies belonging to the sphere of interest of Gyula Balásy; according to the announcement the decision results in savings of close to half a billion forints and is part of the screening under way at the public media, whose purpose is to uncover the operational anomalies that served the propaganda of the previous government. According to the reasoning of interim CEO András Horváth, without termination the overpriced contracts would have entailed “an obligation to place orders even in the absence of an actual task”. On the same day, at the extended session of the Public Service Council, the nomination procedure for the media-professional members of the Independent Public Media Board was concluded: in the secret ballot the three highest vote counts went to media lawyer Judit Bayer, media researcher Miklós Sükösd and writer and literary organiser Árpád Kollár. Finally, on 20 August at six in the morning — in the place of the news service shut down on 7 July — the news programme of M1 returned, with four editions that day.

The three steps reach into the structure at different depths, and this is worth treating separately. The institutional framework of the nomination procedure is given by the amendment of the media act adopted on 23 June: MTVA has been merged into Duna Médiaszolgáltató Nonprofit Zrt., out of which Magyar Rádió és Televízió Nonprofit Zrt. will be created, while MTI becomes independent again. Into the nine-member Independent Public Media Board replacing the abolished Public Service Foundation, three members may be nominated by the governing parties, three by the opposition parties and three by media-professional organisations — the nominees are heard by the cultural committee of Parliament at a public session, after which Parliament decides on the members and the chair of the board, expectedly on 31 August. According to the summary of Media1, the nomination procedure was launched by fifteen nominations from twenty media-professional organisations, of which four were invalidated for formal deficiencies. An important point of public-law precision: the members of the board are elected by Parliament, not appointed by the Government — the committee hearing is a proposal, the decision is a parliamentary act.

The substantive and the personnel side, however, give a more contradictory picture. According to the report of Telex, opposition views and views critical of the government also appeared in the first edition of the news programme, and the programme also carried the news concerning its own institution — the contract termination and the board nominations, including the professional criticisms of the selection procedure. At the same time, an earlier article of the paper reported that staff members who had previously worked on the propaganda materials also remained in place in the newsroom; in reply to the paper’s questions Duna Médiaszolgáltató stated that the audit is in progress and that it does not provide information on individual employment decisions, citing data-protection reasons. MIAK’s reading is therefore that among the three operations the order of difficulty is precisely the reverse of the order of visibility: the supplier step and the content step are within executive competence, hence they can be taken quickly — and for the same reason they can also be reversed with a single signature. The institutional step is the slow one and the decisive one.

Part II — Foundations in the literature

Before turning to the proposals, it is worth putting down why a change of persons and a termination of contracts are not enough. The first “filter” of the 1988 work Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (an American economist and a linguist and media critic, defining authors of the political economy of the mass media) is the ownership and financing structure: according to the authors, content distortion is produced not primarily by direct instruction but by the question of in whose hands access and money are — therefore the termination of the supplier network is a structural, not merely a financial step. The book Spin Dictators by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman (an economist and a political scientist, describers of modern autocracies built on information manipulation instead of open repression) makes this concrete: the state media contract is itself the instrument of control, and the authors also discuss the Hungarian media consolidation as an example — that is, the contracts now terminated were not incidentally expensive, they were part of the mechanism. And the 1928 work Propaganda by Edward Bernays (an Austrian-American communications expert, the founder of the theory of modern audience organisation) reminds us that the institutionalised filtering of opinion formation follows from the structure of democratic publicity, it is not the pathology of one system — hence the aim is not to abolish the filter but to make the filter visible and multi-actor. The detailed treatment of the literature — author by author, with quotations — can be found in section 6.4 Literature in detail.

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures, and ties all three to a single yardstick, the irreversibility test: for every public-media step the question must be put whether a future government could undo it with a single decision. Where the answer is yes, a rule must also be attached to the step.

3.1 A supplier concentration cap and a public production procurement register (from the 2027 budget year)

According to the test, the termination of the Balásy contracts is entirely reversible: a new contract can be concluded at any time, whether with the same circle or with another. MIAK therefore proposes two rules that presuppose each other. One is a supplier concentration cap: a production supplier belonging to a single ownership circle should not be able to receive more than 15 per cent of the value of the public media’s external production orders in one budget year, and the ownership circle should be defined at the level of the ultimate beneficial owner, not by company name — otherwise the cap can be circumvented by founding a company. The other is a public production procurement register: every external production order should be accessible in machine-readable form with its contractual value, its term, the ultimate beneficial owner of the contracting party and the subject of performance, updated quarterly. These two elements are the direct regulatory equivalent of the Herman–Chomsky first filter (see 6.4.1): it does not supervise the content but the financing structure out of which content distortion arises even without instruction. The proposal builds on the A7 media pluralism programme point, and the technical implementation of the register may follow the data-structure logic of the D11 algorithmic transparency register.

3.2 Raising the nomination procedure and the confirmation to statutory level (before the election of the board)

According to the test, the nomination procedure of the Independent Public Media Board is irreversible if and only if it is fixed not by procedural practice but by law. MIAK asks for three elements at statutory level: objective, pre-published criteria for the circle of nominating media-professional organisations (time in operation, membership, professional activity — not case-by-case invitation); the requirement of a two-thirds parliamentary majority for the confirmation of the professional nominees; and a fixed term of office for the board members, offset from the parliamentary cycle, so that no single majority can replace the entire board. The last element is the most important and the least spectacular: the offset mandate is the only structural guarantee that works irrespective of the nomination proportions. The present procedure — the secret ballot, the voting right of the trade-union delegates, the invalidation of nominations with formal deficiencies — looks like good practice, but it remains practice as long as it is not law. The proposal connects to the A6 checks and balances and the KU2 media pluralism monitoring programme points.

3.3 A written editorial statute and pluralism monitoring starting with a base year (by the fourth quarter of 2026)

According to the test, the return of the news programme is the most easily reversible step: a programme structure can be transformed at any time, and the partial continuity of the personnel also shows this vulnerability. MIAK therefore asks for a written editorial statute which is not about persons but about the route of decision: who decides on the publication of an item and when, in what case an editorial decision may be overridden at management level, how such an override is documented, and what internal remedy the editor has. Let this document be public, because for the reader and the viewer this is the only verifiable guarantee. In addition, MIAK proposes that the KU2 media pluralism monitoring should start already in 2026 with a base year — with measured indicators on source diversity, on the proportion of the political actors given a voice and on the presence of critical voices — because without fixing the 2026 starting state the change of the coming years will not be demonstrable. The KU7 media literacy programme and the D8 disinformation-detection system may use the same data base.

The three proposals are connected by the same principle: the credibility of the transformation of the public media is measured not by how much it dismantled but by how much it bound upon itself as well. The irreversibility test is therefore not an expression of distrust towards the present management, but the recognition that, according to the framework of the literature, the mechanism of distortion is tied not to persons but to structure — and what is structural can only be prevented by structural means.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Use of public money The concentration cap and the register make overpriced orders without a task verifiable; the present termination frees up close to half a billion forints The cap may run into the narrowness of the market: in some fields (live broadcast technology, large studio production) there really are few domestic providers, and artificial distribution may raise prices
Media pluralism The statutory nomination procedure and the offset mandate allow no single majority to replace the board in one go The two-thirds confirmation may also create a stalemate: if there is no agreement, the board may be left without members — the law has to provide a transitional rule
Editorial operation The written statute makes the editorial decision predictable and documentable, independently of the persons in management The formal statute can also be hollowed out: if documenting an override has no consequence, it will become mere paperwork
Public trust The base year of the pluralism monitoring makes the change measurable, hence demonstrable Short-term trust is decided not by the data but by the faces seen on screen; measured improvement and perceived improvement may diverge for years

The main trade-off is between speed and being bound. The present management has an objective interest in quick control: a shut-down news service has to be restarted, a contract portfolio of the order of a hundred billion forints has to be screened, and all this within months. The interest of media pluralism, by contrast, is that the room for manoeuvre now acquired should become bound — that is, a voluntary narrowing of one’s own instruments. This tension is real and cannot be dissolved by rhetoric; the analysis of 444.hu named precisely this internal dilemma. The proposal tips to the risk side if the introduction of the guarantees is so slow that the present transitional state — with interim management, an interim news director and an audit in progress — solidifies into a lasting form of operation. Transitionality itself is the greatest risk: the longer it is, the greater the chance that practice will remain instead of a rule.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth following? (proposed KPIs)

The performance indicators below (KPIs, Key Performance Indicators) will show in 12 and 24 months whether the three operations have come together into a reform. These are proposed yardsticks, not government commitments.

  • Supplier concentration: by the end of 2027 no single ownership circle should reach 15 per cent of the value of external production orders; the measurement should be feasible from the public register.
  • The existence and quality of the register: from the first quarter of 2027 a quarterly updated, machine-readable production procurement register in which the ultimate beneficial owner also appears.
  • The legal level of the nomination procedure: it is worth following whether the criteria of the nominating organisations, the two-thirds confirmation and the offset term of office get into statutory text, or remain procedural practice.
  • Pluralism index with a base year: the fixing of the 2026 baseline values and a first comparison in 2027 on source diversity and on the proportion of the actors given a voice.
  • The publicity of the editorial statute: whether the document is accessible, and whether it contains an obligation to document management overrides.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s request to the decision-maker is three concrete steps, all three timely in the weeks around the election of the board on 31 August: raise the nomination procedure, the two-thirds confirmation and the offset term of office to statutory level; prescribe the supplier concentration cap and the public production register; and publish the written editorial statute still during the time of the interim management. And towards the public, a recommendation of a yardstick: let us measure the transformation of the public media not by the sum of the terminated contracts and not by the faces seen on screen, but by what a next government cannot undo with a single signature.

Two MIAK foundational values are directly at stake here. Transparency, because the supplier network and the editorial route of decision are today equally invisible: the public learns about the one only at termination and about the other only in the event of a conflict — the register and the statute abolish precisely this invisibility. And universal representation, because the public media by definition belongs to every taxpayer, not to the majority of the day; the statutory nomination guarantee is not the protection of one political side but the assurance that after the next change of government publicity will not be the property of a single camp either.

Part VI — Reasoning and further sources

6.1 The press framing by spectrum

The left-liberal band connected the personnel and the structural question among the three operations, and this is where the most critical edge appeared. Telex devoted a separate piece to the fact that alongside the return of the news programme, staff members who had previously worked on the propaganda materials also remained in place in the newsroom — the article used a concrete comparison of positions and an internal source, and also carried the reply of the interim news director, according to which the earlier team did not take part in editing the broadcast of 20 August. In its report on the contract termination the paper also highlighted that Gyula Balásy himself offered his companies to the state in May, but the state has so far not availed itself of this possibility. HVG placed the same thread into the process as a whole: it presented the contract termination together with the similar decision of the Prime Minister’s Office at the beginning of August and with the criminal complaint of the defence ministry, indicating that the direction of the offer and of the break are not the same. 444.hu formulated the deepest internal contradiction: according to its analysis the interim management has to screen the staff and recruit a team at the same time, and the paper also recounted the history of the July–August appointment withdrawals.

The public-affairs and the economic band chose the procedural and the financial cross-section respectively. 24.hu detailed the legal course of the nomination procedure — that after the committee hearing Parliament elects, and that the Public Service Council and the Independent Public Media Board are two different bodies with different tasks — which was the day’s clearest report from the point of view of competence precision. Portfolio took over the news-agency announcement and put the emphasis on the order of magnitude of the savings.

The conservative band framed the personnel and the power-technique thread. Mandiner put the question of the majority on the supervisory board at the centre, and emphasised the tension that alongside the promise of an independent public media, the appointments of two newly appointed executives were withdrawn after a comment by the prime minister — the article also quoted the reaction of the removed editor-in-chief. The Wednesday piece of Magyar Nemzet carried the contract termination as a statement of fact (the article was not publicly downloadable, we mark it only on the basis of the title and the summary of the press monitor). ATV carried the same case as its lead item (the article was not publicly downloadable), while Népszava highlighted the programme-structure side of the return of the news programme (title-level reference only).

6.2 Facts and data

Datum Value Source
The terminated contracts New Land Media, Lounge Design (in the sphere of interest of Gyula Balásy), with immediate effect Duna Médiaszolgáltató announcement, Telex, HVG, Portfolio
The saving from the termination close to 500 million forints Duna Médiaszolgáltató announcement
The adoption of the media act amendment 23 June 2026 Telex
The composition of the Independent Public Media Board 9 members: 3 governing-party, 3 opposition, 3 media-professional nominations Telex, 24.hu
The figures of the professional nomination procedure 20 nominating organisations, 15 nominations, 4 invalidated, 11 hearings 24.hu (on the basis of the Media1 summary)
The professional nominees voted through Judit Bayer, Miklós Sükösd, Árpád Kollár Announcement of the Public Service Council, Telex, 24.hu
The expected day of the parliamentary decision 31 August 2026 Telex, 24.hu
The shutdown and the return of the news service shut down on 7 July 2026, returned on 20 August at 6:00 Telex
The number of news editions 4 editions on 20 August, 2 a day from 21 August Telex

The most telling row of the table is the figures of the nomination procedure: twenty organisations submitted fifteen nominations, so the professional side actively availed itself of the possibility, but the four formal invalidations also indicate that the criteria and the documentation requirements were not clear in advance to everyone. This is precisely the point that proposal 3.2 would handle with the objective, pre-published criteria for the nominating organisations.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Culture (programme points) — measuring the pluralism of the public media as a cultural public institution: KU2 media pluralism monitoring, KU7 media literacy programme;
  • Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points) — the supplier structure and the nomination guarantee as an institutional question: A6 checks and balances, A7 media pluralism, A9 spin-dictatorship prevention index, A13 disinformation resilience;
  • Digitalisation and AI regulation (programme points) — the data infrastructure of the register and the monitoring: D8 disinformation-detection system, D11 algorithmic transparency register;
  • Culture (background material) — the cultural mission of the public service media and the questions of rebuilding the programme structure.

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 Edward S. Herman – Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent

The volume identifies five “filters” through which the news passes before it reaches the audience, and the first of these is the ownership and financing structure. The authors describe the concentration of the media not as a moral but as an entry-cost question: operating a medium with significant reach is so capital-intensive that the ownership circle necessarily remains narrow. They summarise the joint operation of the filters as follows:

“The five filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates, and even more sharply limit what can become »big news«, subject to sustained news campaigns.”

The essence of the model is that the distortion follows not from instruction but from structure: whoever controls access and money does not have to give a content order, because the filter works by itself. In the case of the Hungarian public media this explains precisely why the termination of the Balásy contracts is not enough as a one-off step: the termination excludes one concrete supplier circle, but leaves the structure of the filter — the possibility of concentrating production orders — untouched. If tomorrow another circle receives the same proportion, the mechanism is restored. Hence the two elements of proposal 3.1: the concentration cap loosens the narrowness of the filter, while the public register makes the filter itself visible.

📖 Source: Edward S. Herman – Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent — The Political Economy of the Mass Media

6.4.2 Guriev and Treisman: Spin Dictators

The volume describes the toolkit of modern authoritarian governance, and in its chapter on media control it names state procurement explicitly as a channel of influence. The authors show that in Peru Montesinos offered an exclusive story or a tax credit in exchange for positive material about the regime, while in Venezuela government media spending tripled within a few years. The book discusses the Hungarian case by name: according to the authors the task of media consolidation was given to an old acquaintance of the prime minister, and the volume also states the order of magnitude of the wealth accumulated. The general proposition of the mechanism is this:

“Dictators do not always have to use illegal means to monopolise power, it is often enough for them to abuse the legal ones.”

The book also records that spin dictatorship does not aim at total control: an opposition medium that can be put in the shop window is useful, because it can be produced as evidence for press freedom. This observation gives the inverted reading of the present situation of the Hungarian public media: the critical views appearing in the first edition of the news programme do not in themselves yet prove structural change — only if there is a written rule that their appearance is not a function of a management decision. The editorial statute of proposal 3.3 makes precisely this difference verifiable.

📖 Source: Sergei Guriev – Daniel Treisman: Spin Dictators

6.4.3 Edward Bernays: Propaganda

Bernays’s 1928 work is the first systematic theory of modern audience organisation, and it is relevant here because it writes not about the pathology of the phenomenon but about its necessity. According to his starting point, in large societies the decision itself would be impossible without filtering the information needed for public decision:

“Voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions.”

This argument is uncomfortable, but from the point of view of MIAK’s proposal it is exactly the right starting point. If filtering is unavoidable — and in a public media which arranges the important items among the events of the day in two news broadcasts a day it is obviously unavoidable — then the policy question is not the abolition of filtering but who filters, according to what rule, and whether that rule is visible. What has changed since Bernays’s time is that the visibility of the filter can today be solved technically: a written statute, a public order register and a measured pluralism index together make verifiable precisely what Bernays still treated as a given. In the case of the Hungarian public media it is this triad that turns the word “renewal” into a measurable state.

📖 Source: Edward Bernays: Propaganda

6.5 International comparison

The closest and most recent parallel is Poland. After the 2023 change of government the new cabinet replaced the leadership of the public media that had served government propaganda for eight years, and the operation sharpened into a political conflict — representatives of the former governing party marched into the headquarters of the public television to prevent the takeover, while the head of the culture ministry removed all the old executives. The lesson of the Polish case for the Hungarian process is twofold: a quick executive takeover works technically, but it remains attackable precisely because it is an executive act — that is, after the next change it can be repeated in exactly the same way. This is the sharpest practical illustration of the irreversibility test.

On the side of institutional guarantees the German public service model offers usable elements: there the membership of the boards is fixed by law, the delegating circle also includes churches, trade unions, cultural and civil organisations, and the mandates expire in offset cycles — so that no single election result replaces the entire supervision. The German system is not flawless: it is precisely the composition of the delegating circle that tends to be the subject of political debate. But the mandate offset as a technique can be taken over, and it is the least spectacular yet most structural element of MIAK’s proposal 3.2. The media freedom regulation of the European Union also gives a legal framework to this: the transparency requirements concerning the appointment and dismissal procedure of the management of public service media orient member-state legislation as well.

Culture

  • KU2 — Media pluralism monitoring
  • KU7 — Disinformation resilience and media literacy programme

Transparency and anti-corruption policy

  • A6 — Strengthening checks and balances
  • A7 — Media pluralism as an institutional guarantee
  • A9 — Spin-dictatorship prevention index
  • A13 — Disinformation resilience

Digitalisation and AI regulation

  • D8 — Disinformation-detecting AI system
  • D11 — Algorithmic transparency register

Proposed new programme point: A supplier concentration cap and a public production procurement register in the public media — for the Culture area.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK press monitor, 20 August 2026 — topic 2):

  • [Telex] A közmédia szerződést bontott Balásy Gyula cégeivel — https://telex.hu/gazdasag/2026/08/19/kozmedia-duna-mediaszolgaltato-zrt-szerzodesbontas-new-land-mediaval-lounge-designnal
  • [Telex] Megvan, kiket jelölnek a médiaszakmai szervezetek a Független Közmédia Testületbe — https://telex.hu/belfold/2026/08/19/fuggetlen-kozmedia-testulet-mediaszakmai-szervezetek-jeloltjei
  • [Telex] Ellenzéki és a kormánnyal kritikus vélemények bemutatásával indult el a közmédia új Híradója — https://telex.hu/belfold/2026/08/20/kozmedia-uj-hirado-m1-augusztus-20
  • [Telex] Azokkal együtt újul meg egyelőre az M1 híradója, akik korábban a propagandát gyártották — https://telex.hu/belfold/2026/08/19/mtva-m1-atalakitas-felfuggesztesek-maradasok
  • [HVG] Felmondta a közmédia a Balásy Gyula cégeivel kötött szerződéseit — https://hvg.hu/kkv/20260819_kozmedia-balasy-gyula-cegek-szerzodesbontas-new-land-media-lounge-design
  • [24.hu] Megvan a közmédia-testület három szakmai jelöltje — https://24.hu/belfold/2026/08/19/kozmedia-testulet-szakmai-jeloltek/
  • [444.hu] Legfőbb belső dilemmájával szembesül a Tisza a közmédia átalakításánál — https://444.hu/2026/08/19/legfobb-belso-dilemmajaval-szembesul-a-tisza-a-kozmedia-atalakitasanal
  • [Portfolio] A közmédia is felmondta a szerződéseit Balásy Gyula cégeivel: jelentős összeget spórolnak meg vele — https://www.portfolio.hu/gazdasag/20260819/a-kozmedia-is-felmondta-a-szerzodeseit-balasy-gyula-cegeivel-jelentos-osszeget-sporolnak-meg-vele-857376
  • [Magyar Nemzet] Azonnali hatállyal szerződést bontott Balásy Gyula cégeivel a közmédia — https://magyarnemzet.hu/belfold/2026/08/balasy-gyula-kozmedia-szerzodes (the article was not publicly downloadable)
  • [Mandiner] „Nem hinném…" – Magyar Péter szerint nem állhat elő ellenzéki többség a közmédia felügyelőtestületében — https://mandiner.hu/belfold/2026/08/nem-hinnem-magyar-peter-szerint-nem-allhat-elo-ellenzeki-tobbseg-a-kozmedia-felugyelotestuleteben
  • [ATV] Beintett a közmédia Balásy Gyula cégeinek: azonnal szerződést bontottak a NER kedvenc médiavállalkozójával — https://www.atv.hu/belfold/20260820/kozmedia-balasy-gyula-cegek/ (the article was not publicly downloadable)
  • [Népszava] Négy híradóval, Vitray Tamással, Romsics Ignáccal és Kapu Tiborral tér vissza a közmédia — https://nepszava.hu/ (title-level reference only)

Knowledge base references (literature):

  • 📖 Edward S. Herman – Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent — The Political Economy of the Mass Media
  • 📖 Sergei Guriev – Daniel Treisman: Spin Dictators
  • 📖 Edward Bernays: Propaganda

Note: the local file path of the books does not appear in the visible text of the blog — only the author and the title. The file path is an internal matter of the generation process, not the reader’s.

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Culture (programme points; programme point IDs: KU2, KU7)
  • MIAK policy area: Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points; programme point IDs: A6, A7, A9, A13)
  • MIAK policy area: Digitalisation and AI regulation (programme points; programme point IDs: D8, D11)
  • MIAK policy area: Culture (background material)
  • MIAK press monitor, 20 August 2026 — topic 2, score: 89/100

Supplementary public data sources:

  • Media Pluralism Monitor (Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom, European University Institute)
  • Reporters Without Borders — press freedom index
  • European Commission — implementation reports of the EU media freedom regulation
  • Duna Médiaszolgáltató annual reports; analyses of the Mérték Media Analysis Workshop

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