Official: Media ‘strategic sector’, matter of sovereignty – conference

Addressing a conference organised by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Orban, who also heads the university’s board of trustees, said that 70-80 percent of media in Western countries were owned by the state.

Before 2010, this ratio was lower than 24 percent in Hungary, he said, adding that this put the country in a position of “terrible vulnerability”. Now this ratio has increased to more than 50 percent, Orban said. Yet “Western liberals” slam Hungary for a state of affairs which is “quite natural” in their own countries, he added.

Orban said media owners included Hungarian foundations, associations, individuals, including conservatives, socialists, liberals, and Hungarian churches, as well as the Hungarian state. He added that Hungary’s media market had undergone an organic and healthy transformation.

He insisted that in the Western media world, media and ideology were, “sadly”, becoming more and more heavily intertwined, and he said Hungarians, post-1990, had known all too well how the media could become “the handmaiden of certain ideologies”.

Orban said “wokeness, based on neo-Marxism,” had captured large sections of the media, and Hungarians were “unhappy about this”. “Hungarians support people who don’t think like this,” he said.

The official accused the Hungarian left wing and their supporting media of being financed largely “from abroad through various grey channels”, which he called the biggest scandal of the period after Hungary’s 1989-1990 change in political system.