Hungary's state news channel M1 went black at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, July 7, 2026, replaced by white text reading: "Public media must not lie. We apologize for having done so for years anyway. Public media are now being restructured so that they will be independent and credible in the future. The news service is temporarily paused. Stay tuned!"
The blackout extended across Hungary's public radio and television, halting all news and political programming. Only the website of the MTI news agency, also part of the public media holding MTVA, continued publishing political news.
Prime Minister Peter Magyar, whose Tisza party (Respect and Freedom) won power on April 12, called it a historic day. "A historic day. Today the broadcasting of propaganda in public media ends," he wrote on Facebook. "They lied day and night, on every wavelength. That is now over."
Key figures at M1 lost their posts the same day, including channel chief Zsolt Nemeth, known by the nickname "Pitbull" for his combative style, along with most program directors and show leaders. A transitional director had already been installed at MTVA the previous week and named temporary new leadership at M1 on Tuesday.
Nearly four hours after going dark, M1 resumed broadcasting at exactly 7:56 p.m. — a deliberate echo of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising crushed by Soviet troops. The channel aired the Hungarian film classic "The Witness" (1979), a satire of Stalinist Hungary. The website of M1's flagship news program, Hirado, still displayed the black apology screen.
A legacy of disinformation
Under Orban, Hungary's public broadcaster had for years spread narratives accusing migrants of crimes against Hungarian girls, portraying the EU as indoctrinating children, and describing Ukraine as a "mafia state" exploiting Hungarian pensioners and youth. Orban established a government-aligned media authority, NMHH, shortly after his 2010 election win, pushed through a new media law, and folded public broadcasters into the MTVA holding. Most independent journalists were dismissed or left in 2011.
Coverage regularly targeted the EU and philanthropist George Soros, while opposition politicians were largely absent despite legal requirements for balanced reporting. In one widely cited incident from May 20, 2018, Hirado reported as real news a satirical German article claiming the city of Essen had been renamed "Fasten" during Ramadan as a gesture to Muslims — and never issued a correction. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, MTVA channels intensified pro-Kremlin narratives, portraying Ukraine as an aggressor.
Private media faced similar consolidation. On November 28, 2018, pro-Orban businessmen "donated" 476 media outlets to the newly formed Central European Press and Media Foundation (Kesma) without compensation, covering nearly the entire pro-government private media market. The left-liberal newspaper Nepszabadsag was shut down in 2016.
Independent journalists have broadly welcomed the changes but are calling for genuine input into the transition. Under the government's plan, a new oversight board for the restructured media holding would be split evenly among representatives of the governing majority, the parliamentary opposition, and independent journalist associations.
Orban criticized the overhaul on Facebook as "a new act of arbitrariness by the Tisza party." Fidesz lawmaker Balazs Nemeth, a former Hirado news anchor associated with some of the channel's most criticized coverage, wrote after the blackout: "Hungarian democracy is dead."