How Hungarian pro-government media reports on war in Ukraine: twenty months, a thousand headlines and sixty-two world wars

“Russia has launched an attack on Ukraine”

– this was the headline that greeted readers at the top of Origo's front page in bold letters on the morning of 24 February 2022. It was the lead story in virtually every newspaper in the world that day. Twenty months later, on 21 October 2023, the same place featured the headline below as breaking news:

"Ukrainians admit utter failure, war may be decided".

This could be a tragically beautiful way of summing up the events of the past year and a half, but there is one small problem: Ukraine has not admitted to failure. If one looks beyond the bombastic title, they will find that the article simply reports that the Russians have made slight advances in the region of Kupyansk. And the war is not over either. Nor has it ended another twenty-six times before, which is exactly how many times Origo has proclaimed so in its breaking news section. Thankfully, a world war/nuclear war also hasn’t yet broken out, albeit not to Origo's credit: in the past twenty months, they have announced it was about to go down in their headlines no less than sixty-two times.

The average reader may, of course, with some goodwill, be inclined to overlook some world war alarmism, but there comes a point where one begins to suspect that the news coverage here is not one hundred percent in sync with reality.

Although both Telex and other news outlets have previously written about the practices at Origo on several occasions, it is important to once again emphasise that gloating or self-serving mockery of the competition is in no way the goal of this article. Origo is the flagship of KESMA (Central European Press and Media Foundation), a media empire which includes hundreds of media outlets, which was declared by the Hungarian government to be of national strategic importance, and is one of the most important channels of the Fidesz communication machine, reaching approximately three and a half million people a month.

The kind of (fake) news published in the most prominent position on this paper's front page and the wording used provides an unparalleled documentary on Hungary in 2022-2023 and a glimpse into the operation of government propaganda machinery.

This is particularly significant in the shadow of the "Sovereignty Protection Act" (currently being prepared) which the government plans to use to further repress and stifle the free press in Hungary.

Origo, on the other hand, demonstrates the type of press that Fidesz does not see as a threat to Hungarian sovereignty, and in fact considers desirable. After all, members of the government gladly give interviews to Origo, (in contrast to their willingness to speak with the independent press), the paper is literally flooded with state advertising, and its editor-in-chief is a regular guest at events organized for the inner circle of Fidesz, such as Viktor Orbán's annual speech in Kötcse.

When one takes a look at the front page of Origo, they see the image of what the government would like to see the Hungarian media become.

This is the picture we will now look at a little more closely. To do this, we used Wayback Machine's public online archive to download all the versions of Origo's saved front-pages from the 20 months since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, and then extracted the content of the breaking news section. Although the archive's automation sometimes takes hundreds of snapshots of a front page a day (the entire archive stores more than 48,000 such snapshots going back 24 years), it is possible that some headlines were missed. It follows that any mention of a number in connection with titles in the article should be understood to mean at least that many.

Using the online archive, we collected just over a thousand headlines from the past 20 months. This includes a few duplicates, some slightly reworded versions and of course news that aren't about the war – but the vast majority, around 900 titles are about the war. Thus, the whole database is indicative of how the flagship of the pro-government media communicates about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict to its typically Fidesz-supporting readership.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so we'd like to show a picture with almost a thousand words. We've created a word cloud from the Origo headlines – the rule with infographics like this one is that the bigger a font used for a word, the more times it appears in the source text. So here's what twenty months of Origo's breaking news look like:

One of the things the word cloud reveals is that the titles are rather Russia-centric, with more references to Putin than to Zelensky, and more mentions of Russia than of Ukraine. Of course, this in itself does not imply much, the important thing is the context in which these words are used. And this is what opens a window to the pure Russian propaganda (it is important to note that this time we are only looking at the wording of the headlines, and are not examining the veracity of the articles behind them).

The most important question in a war is always who will win. In the first months of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the Russians captured roughly a quarter of Ukraine's territory and destroyed Mariupol, the country's tenth biggest city. Then, during the Ukrainian counter-offensive, they withdrew from some key areas, and there has now been a stalemate for some time. Communicating this as a victory is not very realistic from either side – especially as the original Russian invasion plan was for Kyiv to fall in three days.

By contrast, in the Origo headlines:

• The terms lose, loss, collapse, destruction, failure have been used 26 times in relation to the Ukrainians and only once for the Russians.
• The word victory has been used exclusively in connection with the Russian side.
• The term in trouble has appeared 22 times in relation to Ukraine. Additionally, Zelensky is said to be in trouble twice, NATO once and the West twice. Russia and Putin haven’t been in trouble even once.
• Failure, debacle, and desperation were mentioned ten times, all ten times in connection with the Ukrainians, the West or America.

Even more telling are the patterns of the occurrence of words that carry a strong emotional charge. For example: who is fearful and terrified; and who is feared and terrifying? In Origo's world, the former role is assigned to Ukraine and the West (ten mentions, compared to zero mentions of Russia), the latter to the Russians. Russia's super-weapons, Putin's messages and plans, Russia's allies, and Chechen warlord Kadyrov are all feared and dreaded. These adjectives appear a total of twenty-two times in connection with them, but only once when referring to the other side, the US military.

The terms mad, craze and frenzy are also used exclusively to describe the Ukrainians and the West (eleven mentions, as opposed to zero use in relation to Russia). The same goes for lying, getting caught out, being exposed: the Ukrainians lied twenty-one times, Zelensky himself seven times, the Americans six times, the Germans twice, and NATO, Joe Biden and the Poles once each.

According to Origo headlines, the Russians have never lied.

The term provocation appears in the headlines thirteen times. Eleven of these provocations were directed at Russia, one at China (by the USA) and one at the whole world (by Zelensky). The terms terror and terrorist attack are used eight times to describe a perceived act directed at Russia, and only once to describe Russian terror. However, one of the favourite terms of Russian propaganda, Nazi, also appears four times: and in each case, the Ukrainians are the ones referred to as Nazis.

Although Western arms supplies are gradually helping put Ukraine in a position of military superiority in the war, in Origo's alternate universe the reader remains unaware of this: headlines mention new Russian miracle weapons fifteen times, while there are only two mentions of anything similar in connection with Ukraine or the US. Of these four, one is a threat about chemical weapons, one about biological weapons, and two are about how American military technology is failing on the front lines.

And as for how the war will end? On the one hand, the Origo narrative is constantly keeping the fatal escalation of the conflict on the agenda – we have already mentioned that a world war almost broke out sixty-two times so far – but on twelve other occasions they published breaking news claiming that a new country might be joining the war (narrator: it hasn't).

Fortunately, the hope for peace has occasionally also appeared among the selectively gloomy headlines, and Origo leaves no doubt as to who it is who wants peace. Putin is the only one who has a peace plan, a peace proposal, a peace offer, and he is the only one taking the initiative in peace talks, while the Ukrainians keep flat-out declaring that they do not want peace.

Sixty-three!

Of course, life hasn't stopped since we created our database. Since then, in the world of Origo headlines, Ukraine has collapsed (again), the lies of the West have been exposed, Zelensky has gone mad, and of course we weren’t left without a world war either. At the time of writing, the below headline is the breaking news at the top of Origo's cover page:

The article behind the title is a synopsis of an interview, already six days old at the time of publication. The interview was given to Komsomolskaya Pravda (a tabloid of the Russian propaganda machinery) by Fyodor Lukyanov, a foreign policy expert from the circles of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. In this interview, there is a brief side note in which Lukyanov says that the Russian-Ukrainian war and the Gaza conflict may together be considered a world war – but this is only a parenthetical, brief comment that even the Russian editors themselves did not include in the short version of the interview which summarised the important points. It was only highlighted later, when the flagship of Russian state propaganda, Russia Today, which is banned in the EU, used it as the title of its own article, and it is presumably from there that it was picked up by Magyar Nemzet and then Origó.