Nearly 500-page document details manipulation of news at Hungarian state news agency during Orbán era

A group of journalists at the Hungarian state news agency, MTI spent years collecting information detailing how news reports were manipulated at their workplace during the Orbán administrations, —the public media said in a statement. The journalists handed the 482-page document over to MTVA’s new leadership, based on which the management of Duna Médiaszolgáltató Zrt. ordered an internal investigation.

The reporters and news editors, who call themselves the Pro Domo working group, spent more than 10 years collecting correspondence, emails, and chat messages that prove how news were manipulated, falsified, and suppressed at MTI, one of the country’s most important news sources. The working group divided the cases into several categories:

• stories that were suppressed or written under orders;
• stories that were discarded;
• manipulated materials;
• censored and falsified news stories.

According to the statement, the examples included in the document reveal editorial directives aiming to suppress certain news stories, alter their content, or rewrite them according to specific criteria. The documents indicate that, in countless cases involving public affairs, economic issues, and foreign policy, editorial decisions were made based on political considerations. For now, MTVA has released a 15-page excerpt, which they claim is a selection of typical examples from the material. The processing of the complete set of documents is still ongoing.

“Since the compilation was carried out by staff working at the foreign policy desk, this painstakingly extensive inventory is merely the tip of the iceberg,” reads MTVA’s statement.

“Accurate, balanced, and impartial reporting is a fundamental requirement of Hungarian media regulation, the Public Service Code, and of European regulations protecting media freedom. The new leadership of the public media is releasing these documents as part of the ongoing review, in order to strengthen transparency and restore the public’s trust, so that such propagandistic practices cannot be repeated in the future,” they wrote.

Following orders is mandatory, Amnesty International is not to be cited

Although it is just a short compilation, the 15-page document that has now been published still contains numerous interesting cases; for example, it includes an email in which colleagues are reminded that following orders coming from above is mandatory. “Don’t even try to argue about it; it’s better for us all if we get this over with as soon as possible.” In another email, Viktor Orbán’s press secretary, Bertalan Havasi requested the publication of a news story for which he had already written the headline and the lead the MTI should use.

Also of interest is the exchange of messages in which Máté Paczolay, the former spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tells MTI’s Moscow correspondent that when reporting on the talks between Péter Szijjártó and Sergey Lavrov, he should not ask Lavrov any questions. Paczolay wrote that “as agreed, we will not ask questions of the Russian side,” and added that Szijjártó’s office would issue a press release, so it would be sufficient to just report on Lavrov’s remarks. The reporter then asks, “So, other than asking the questions, I have nothing else to do?” to which Paczolay simply replies, “That’s what we’re counting on you to do.”

After our article was published, we were able to reach the former spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who told Telex that in the specific case in question, he had simply relayed the request of the Russian side, namely, that Hungarian reporters should only ask questions of Szijjártó, while the Russians should only address Lavrov. As he explained, this was standard practice—not only in Russia, but also in the United States and elsewhere—and, as the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was his responsibility to convey such requests and agreements to Hungarian journalists.

In one instance in 2022, a reporter of MTI wrote a story about a Russian troll farm exposed by the British government, but couldn’t find the article afterward, so a colleague approached one of the editors to ask what had happened to it. The response was: “It's been discarded. There were also blacklists: citing the German newspaper, Die Welt was forbidden as of April 2018, while the international NGOs Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch became off-limits at MTI starting on November 8, 2019. Based on correspondence compiled by the working group, Direkt36 already reported in 2022 on how the state news agency was suppressing certain news.

After the publication of MTVA’s statement, which also includes a letter written by him, Bertalan Havasi reacted to the document as follows: “Throughout my three-decade career in journalism—of which I spent one and a half decades in government communications—whenever I asked anything of journalists, and whenever I was fulfilling their requests, I did so in compliance with the law, the rules of journalistic ethics, and the standards of day-to-day professional cooperation. I am not the one who poses a threat to the (public) media, but rather the person who uses Facebook’s comment section to dictate who can or cannot be the new editor-in-chief of M1 News; who prescribes in advance in a social media post what program M1 will air when it resumes broadcasting; or who would like to control what can be published in Mandiner from the comfort of his office chair."

The Fidesz press secretary is referring to the fact that MTVA has revoked the appointments of Gábor Hajdu and Miklós Borsa to the positions of editor-in-chief and anchor of the M1 news program. This was done after it was reported that they had previously worked at Fidesz-affiliated media, to which Prime Minister Péter Magyar reacted in a comment under an article on social media, saying, “I don’t think so.