Part I — Situation overview

On 22 September 2026 the National Assembly elected the president and members of the Media Council of the National Media and Infocommunications Authority (NMHH). The president is media lawyer Gábor Polyák, head of the Institute for Art Theory and Media Studies at ELTE, elected with 132 votes in favour and 52 against, for a five-year term. The nomination procedure was unusually open: 11 applicants outlined their ideas at a public committee hearing, and in the end MPs voted only on those whom the delegates of the professional organisations also considered suitable. This filter left four names in. Four of the members obtained a majority: Márta Bencsik, Bea Judit Bodrogi and Krisztina Nagy as nominees of the governing party’s parliamentary group, and Máté Tóth as the nominee of Mi Hazánk, with a strikingly high number of votes in favour, above 171. Two nominees failed: Ferenc Pindroch, put forward by KDNP, received 78 votes in favour and 84 against, and László Szabó, put forward by Fidesz, received 72 in favour and 95 against. The members’ mandate runs for four years, but at most until the next National Assembly is constituted. After the vote the Fidesz MPs left the chamber and did not wait for the swearing-in.

Two further processes are running in the background. One is the personnel transformation of the public media: former, strongly pro-government faces of public television — among them Attila Császár and Beáta Csete — have left, and at Monday’s plenary session they were already sitting in the experts’ box of the opposition parliamentary groups; Attila Császár has since become a communications staffer of the KDNP parliamentary group. The other is an ownership matter. According to Mandiner’s own account, after the dissolution of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium on 31 August the owner of the company publishing the paper became the Ministry of Finance, and on the instruction of Finance Minister András Kármán the publisher’s chief executive, who was also the paper’s online editor-in-chief, was removed. The portal’s content service has since ceased, and its news channel mostly repeats earlier material. On 23 September a further development came to light: according to reports, one of the newly elected members of the body may resign because of a conflict of interest.

MIAK’s reading: this day is a test, not a victory. The openness of the nomination procedure is a substantial step forward compared with earlier practice, and this has to be acknowledged even if, according to the conservative press, the opinion of the professional organisations was ultimately overridden by political considerations. The structural problem, however, is unchanged. The composition of a media authority is still decided today by the parliamentary majority of the day — admittedly by a qualified majority, and it is precisely this threshold that the two minority nominees did not reach, so two seats remained vacant. As a result the composition of the body has become less diverse than the nomination procedure promised. Added to this is the ownership question: if a ministry removes the head of a paper by an owner’s instruction, that is an institutional risk even if the aim of the decision is to dismantle a former propaganda structure. MIAK has to apply the same yardstick it used against the former media system.

Part II — Foundations in the literature

The topic can be understood from the perspective of three authors. In Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (an American economist, and a linguist and social critic, respectively) describe five news filters, and they identify the first of these in the size, concentrated ownership and profit interest of media companies. The ownership structure is therefore not one factor among many, but the one on which the others rest. The book Spin Dictators by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman (a Russian and an American political economist, respectively) shows that today’s semi-authoritarian regimes do not censor openly, but shape the supply of news by indirect means — licensing, ownership reshuffles, defamation suits — and the authors also give Hungarian examples of this. Alexis de Tocqueville (French political thinker, author of Democracy in America) provides the classic argument that there is no tenable intermediate position between freedom of the press and complete state control: whoever wants to restrict abuses ends up restricting freedom. Together, the three lines of thought provide the basis of MIAK’s position: the right tool of media policy is not the regulation of content, but making ownership relations visible. The detailed discussion of the literature — 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. None of them interferes in editorial decisions, and none of them questions the legitimacy of the newly elected body. All three serve the same aim: that the structure of the media market should be public data, and that state involvement should be wound up according to a rule announced in advance.

3.1 Beneficial ownership register and annual media concentration report (first publication by 30 June 2027)

MIAK proposes that the Media Council — in line with the president’s own nomination programme, according to which the authority has a duty to uncover the real owners of media companies — set up a public register of the beneficial owners of media service providers and significant online news portals. The register should trace the ownership chain back to the ultimate natural person, and should be linked to the beneficial ownership data of the company register, so that indirect ownership and trust structures cannot conceal the person exercising ultimate control. An annual media concentration report should be built on this, calculating the Herfindahl–Hirschman index, which measures market concentration, by segment — television, radio, online news portals, print press — and automatically launching an investigation when a threshold is exceeded. The report must also include the breakdown of state advertising spending by outlet, because state advertising is one of the strongest resource-allocation channels of the Hungarian media market. This is the direct implementation of programme point A7, and it also feeds the media pluralism monitoring database of KU2. In the Herman–Chomsky model (see 6.4.1) this makes the first news filter visible: it does not prohibit it, it makes it measurable.

3.2 Rule-based exit for media outlets that passed into state ownership (bill by 31 December 2026)

MIAK proposes that the Government submit a bill, to be adopted by the National Assembly, settling the rules for managing media companies that have passed into state ownership. Four elements are needed. First: ownership rights should be exercised not directly by the line ministry, but by a collegial asset manager designated for this purpose, whose decisions must be reasoned and published — removing an editorial head by ministerial instruction is not a good tool even if the owner’s powers formally provide a basis for it. Second: for every such company an exit plan with a deadline announced in advance should be drawn up, laying down whether the goal is sale, closure or placement in a public-service function, and imposing on buyers the same ownership transparency requirement as the 3.1 register. Third: the preservation of the archive and the editorial data assets should be guaranteed by law — the closure of a paper must not entail the disappearance of content of public interest. Fourth: the rights of employees and the rules of the dismissal procedure should be laid down in advance in the exit plan. The description by Guriev and Treisman (see 6.4.2) warns precisely that the techniques of indirect media control are tool-independent: whoever takes over the tool also takes over the temptation.

3.3 Filling the vacant seats and a guarantee of minority representation (by 31 March 2027)

MIAK proposes that a new nomination round be called for the two vacant seats of the Media Council, using the same public procedure involving the professional organisations that worked in the election of the president. MIAK further proposes that the cardinal act on media services should state that the body is to be considered properly constituted only if at least one third of the mandates are held by nominees of the parliamentary minority of the day. If the minority nominees fail to obtain a majority in two consecutive rounds, the proposal for the nomination should be made by the professional-organisation delegates of the ad hoc committee. The situation that has now arisen — in which two nominees who, seen from the governing side, were opposition nominees failed, while a third nominee put forward by another parliamentary group got in with broad support — shows that today’s rule depends on the goodwill of the majority. MIAK’s proposal would bind any future majority in the same way. This follows from programme point A6 on checks and balances, and follows the logic of the stress test under I10.

The common principle of the three proposals is that media freedom is protected not by the good intentions of the authority, but by public data and procedures laid down in advance. The present situation offers a special opportunity: the rules can be made by a majority that in the short term would use them to narrow its own room for manoeuvre. The quality of a media regulatory system is shown precisely by whether it also works when the other side is in power.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Culture and media The ownership structure becomes public; concentration can be tracked as a time series The administrative burden of the register falls proportionately harder on small newsrooms
Transparency The distribution of state advertising spending becomes verifiable Companies may also evade measurement through reorganisation if the threshold is too mechanical
Economy and ownership relations The exit plan makes the fate of state media assets predictable A fixed timetable may cause a loss of value in the sale if the market timing is bad

The main question to weigh is the boundary of concentration measurement. The traditional, segment-by-segment market index does not capture the advertising dominance of the large international platforms, so on its own it may give a distorted picture: a news market with formally many players can still be heavily dependent on a few distribution platforms. The proposed annual report must therefore devote a separate chapter to the digital advertising market. The second question to weigh is the time horizon of state ownership involvement. If the exit is too fast, value is lost and employees pay the price; if it is too slow, the owner’s powers become a lasting political tool. The proposal works if the timetable is announced, the deadlines are binding, and any deviation has to be justified.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth following? (suggested KPIs)

MIAK proposes the following performance indicators (KPIs: Key Performance Indicators) for monitoring:

  • Ownership coverage: for what percentage of significant media service providers the ultimate owner can be publicly identified. Suggested target: above 95% by 2028.
  • Market concentration: the trend of the Herfindahl–Hirschman index for the television and the online news market; programme point A7 proposes reducing the television value below 2500 within three years.
  • Distribution of state advertising: advertising spending of the state and of state-owned companies, broken down by outlet, published quarterly.
  • Completeness and diversity of the body: the proportion of filled seats on the Media Council, and within this the proportion of nominees of the parliamentary minority.
  • External assessment: the risk indicators of the Hungarian country report of the Media Pluralism Monitor produced at the European University Institute in Florence — a slow-moving but independent benchmark.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s request to the new Media Council is simple: the body’s first major undertaking should not be a content matter, but the setting up of the ownership register and the annual concentration report. And to the government: the fate of media outlets that passed into state ownership should be decided not by ministerial instruction, but by an announced exit plan. The result of media policy is shown not by who happens to be sitting in the studios, but by whether the same rules still apply after the next change of government.

Two of MIAK’s foundational values are in play here. Transparency is concerned because the media market is the area where hidden ownership directly degrades the quality of the public sphere — readers cannot weigh what they read if they do not know who stands behind it. Universal representation is concerned because a media authority fulfils its role only if the range of opinions represented in it is broader than that of the majority of the day; the two vacant seats are therefore not a technical question but one of principle.

Part VI — Reasoning and further sources

6.1 Press framing by spectrum

In the left-liberal band the coverage was procedure-centred. On the day of the nomination 444.hu highlighted that MPs voted only on the applicants who were also supported by the delegates of the professional organisations, and on the day of the election it published the vote shares item by item, including those of the two failed nominees. The same outlet dealt in a separate, satirical article with the new role of former public-television presenters — this framing places the emphasis on the personnel changes, not on the regulatory structure. Telex put a single element of the presidential nominee’s programme, the requirement of ownership transparency, at the centre of its headline (the article was not publicly downloadable at the time of retrieval).

In the public-affairs and economic band Portfolio treated the Media Council election as part of the day’s package of parliamentary decisions, in one news item together with the nomination of the Prosecutor General and a corruption proceeding — in other words, it framed it as an institutional restructuring, not as a media matter.

In the pro-government conservative band the framing is the opposite. Magyar Nemzet claimed that the choice of president had been decided in advance and that the governing party had overridden the opinion of the professional organisations — this is factually hard to reconcile with the fact that the elected president came from the list of four supported by the professional delegates, but it points to a real tension: the right to choose from the four still belongs to the political majority. Mandiner’s article on its own case described the change of management after the change of ownership as a ministerial instruction — from MIAK’s point of view this report is the most valuable element from the conservative band, because it records a verifiable procedural fact, not an assessment. In another piece the outlet traced the public media’s programming decisions back to political pressure; these claims are based on anonymous sources and are therefore not proven in themselves, but they point to the risk points of the current restructuring.

6.2 Facts and data

Data Value Source
Election of Gábor Polyák as president 132 in favour, 52 against, 0 abstentions National Assembly, 22 September 2026
Length of the president’s mandate 5 years National Assembly, 22 September 2026
Length of members’ mandate 4 years, at most until the next National Assembly is constituted National Assembly, 22 September 2026
Elected members Márta Bencsik (186 in favour), Bea Judit Bodrogi (187), Krisztina Nagy (187), Máté Tóth (171) National Assembly, 22 September 2026
Nominees not elected Ferenc Pindroch (78 in favour, 84 against), László Szabó (72 in favour, 95 against) National Assembly, 22 September 2026
Applicants who took part in the public hearing 11 people, of whom 4 were supported by the professional organisations Ad hoc committee of the National Assembly, 21 September 2026
Owner of the company publishing Mandiner Ministry of Finance (after the dissolution of MCC on 31 August 2026) Mandiner, 4 September 2026

Three sources are relevant as the regulatory framework. Article IX of the Fundamental Law recognises the freedom of the press, and entrusts the regulation of the media supervisory body to a cardinal act — it follows that the adoption of the statutory guarantees under proposal 3.3 requires a qualified majority. The EU Digital Services Act (DSA) requires an independent digital services coordinator, a role performed in Hungary by the NMHH — so the question of the body’s composition is not only a domestic media-policy matter. The European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) requires member states to ensure transparency of media ownership and independent governance of public service media; proposal 3.1 would accelerate its implementation.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Culture (programme points) — media pluralism monitoring, measuring the diversity of the public sphere (programme point ID: KU2, KU7);
  • Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points) — media pluralism as an institutional guarantee, ownership transparency, distribution of state advertising (programme point ID: A7, A6);
  • Digitalisation and AI regulation (background material) — platform regulation and the role of digital services coordinator.

6.4 Literature in detail

The authors describe a filter model of five elements through which raw news flows before it appears. The first and most fundamental element of the model is the ownership structure:

“The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news ‘filters,’ fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms”

The book adds that limited ownership is not a new phenomenon and has become ever stronger as capital requirements have grown. Applied to the present Hungarian situation, this means two things. First, the ownership question is not a side issue in media policy, but the layer on which the other effects rest — which is why it takes first place in MIAK’s package of proposals. Second, the model does not presuppose intent: the authors expressly stress that the filters work even when journalists act in complete good faith. The state’s ownership role is therefore risky not because of who exercises it, but because it can be exercised.

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

6.4.2 Sergei Guriev–Daniel Treisman: Spin Dictators

The authors’ thesis is that 21st-century authoritarian leaders rely on shaping information instead of open repression. According to the book, today’s leaders have recognised that “under present conditions the use of violence is not always necessary, and not even necessarily useful”, and they govern by reshaping citizens’ picture of the world instead of intimidating them. The authors also give Hungarian examples of this: the loss of radio stations’ broadcasting licences was explained on formally non-political grounds — swearing on air, and breach of the Hungarian music quota.

In the present situation this description is not an accusation but a warning. Indirect tools — licensing, ownership reshuffles, appointments of executives — do not disappear because someone else exercises them. The essence of MIAK’s proposal is precisely to tie these tools to rules before a subsequent majority rediscovers them.

📖 Source: Sergei Guriev – Daniel Treisman: Spin Dictators (Spindiktátorok)

6.4.3 Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

In the chapter on the liberty of the press Tocqueville speaks with unusual candour: he supports it not because it is good in itself, but because the evils that flow from its absence are greater. His argument, however, rests on a logical observation:

“If anyone could point out an intermediate and yet a tenable position between the complete independence and the entire subjection of the public expression of opinion, I should perhaps be inclined to adopt it; but the difficulty is to discover this position.”

The thesis is directly applicable to today’s debate. For more than a decade Hungarian media policy operated on the assumption that such an intermediate position exists — that the structure of the public sphere can be subtly shaped without harming freedom. According to Tocqueville’s claim there is no such path; regulation either stays away from content, or sooner or later reaches it. This is why MIAK’s three proposals are directed exclusively at the structure: ownership data, the exit procedure, the composition of the body — and none of them at what may be said.

📖 Source: Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

6.5 International comparison

Each of the proposals has a working foreign counterpart. In Germany, the Commission on Concentration in the Media (KEK) regularly analyses market shares, and on this basis one of the largest publishing-television mergers was blocked in 2006 — this is the model for proposal 3.1, with the lesson that measurement is only a tool if it also has consequences. In Denmark the financing of the public media came for a long time directly from a media licence fee collected from households, which made the organisation independent of day-to-day budget bargaining; tying Hungarian public-media financing to an automatic formula laid down in law would aim at the same stability. For the management of media outlets that have passed into state ownership, the cleanest model is the collegial governance of public service broadcasters: where ownership rights are exercised not by a ministry but by a board of trustees drawn from multiple sources, a change of management cannot be a matter of a single signature. In EU law the same requirement follows from the European Media Freedom Act, whose implementation is the task of the member states.

Transparency and anti-corruption policy

  • A7 — Media pluralism as an institutional guarantee
  • A6 — Strengthening checks and balances

Culture

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

Justice

  • I10 — Constitutional “stress test”

Proposed new programme point: Rule-based exit regime for media companies that have passed into state ownership — for the Transparency and anti-corruption policy area.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK press monitor, 22 September 2026 — topic 2):

Knowledge base references (literature):

  • 📖 Edward S. Herman – Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent — The Political Economy of the Mass Media
  • 📖 Sergei Guriev – Daniel Treisman: Spin Dictators (Spindiktátorok)
  • 📖 Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Culture (programme points; programme point ID: KU2, KU7)
  • MIAK policy area: Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points; programme point ID: A7, A6)
  • MIAK policy area: Digitalisation and AI regulation (background material)
  • MIAK press monitor, 22 September 2026 — topic 2, score: 90/100

Supplementary public data sources:

  • Media Pluralism Monitor (European University Institute, Florence) — Hungarian country report
  • European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) — media ownership transparency requirements
  • Mérték Media Monitor — media ownership database
  • NMHH annual reports

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