Hungarian Radio and Television (Magyar Rádió és Televízió Nonprofit Zrt.)

Hungarian Radio and Television (Magyar Rádió és Televízió Nonprofit Zrt.) is the designated successor to Hungary’s integrated public service broadcasting organisation. The new structure replaces the system established after the 2010 media reforms, in which the Media Services and Support Trust Fund (Médiaszolgáltatás-támogató és Vagyonkezelő Alap, MTVA) concentrated staff, production facilities and resources while Duna Médiaszolgáltató Nonprofit Zrt. held responsibility for providing the public media services. MTVA was absorbed into Duna Médiaszolgáltató on 26 July 2026. The successor continued to operate under the Duna corporate name pending completion of the legal reorganisation and registration of the Magyar Rádió és Televízió name, and the regulator’s register of public service media services, updated on 8 October 2026, still names Duna Médiaszolgáltató Nonprofit Zrt. as the service provider.

Separate incorporation of Magyar Távirati Iroda (MTI) remains part of the reform. The organisation employed around 2,500 people before the April 2026 change of government, and reporting at the beginning of October 2026 put the workforce at about 2,000, a figure not drawn from audited accounts.

Media assets

Television: M1, M2, Duna, M4 Sport, M5, Duna World and M4 Sport+, the last of these sharing broadcast capacity with Duna World. The broadcaster also operates the internet-only M6 service and the M4 Sport 1 to M4 Sport 5 streams.

Radio: Kossuth Rádió, Petőfi Rádió, Bartók Rádió, Dankó Rádió, Nemzetiségi Rádió, Parlamenti Rádió, Nemzeti Sportrádió, Szakcsi Rádió and Csukás Meserádió, the last two internet-only.

News agency: Magyar Távirati Iroda (MTI), currently part of the integrated operation and designated for separation into an independent public service news agency.

Digital: hirado.hu and the broadcaster’s television, radio and on-demand services.

Ownership and governance

Until 2026 the public media institutions were overseen by the Media Council, part of the National Media and Infocommunications Authority (NMHH). The Council had five members elected by Parliament for nine-year terms by a two-thirds majority on the nomination of a parliamentary committee, and its responsibilities included licensing broadcasters, monitoring compliance with media law and appointing and supervising the leaders of MTVA and Duna Médiaszolgáltató. Ownership rights were held by the Public Service Foundation (Közszolgálati Közalapítvány). The Media Council chair exercised the employer’s rights over the MTVA chief executive.

That architecture was dismantled after the parliamentary election of 12 April 2026, at which the Tisza Party won 141 of the 199 seats. Parliament adopted the amending law on 23 June 2026 by 145 votes to 39, with Tisza and Mi Hazánk in favour and Fidesz-KDNP against. Act XXI of 2026, amending Act CLXXXV of 2010 on media services and mass communication and Act XXXVI of 2012 on the National Assembly, was promulgated on 26 June 2026; its preamble states the aim of restoring the independence of the Media Council and of public service media. The mandates of the Media Council’s chair and members and of the chief executives of Duna Médiaszolgáltató and MTVA ended the day after promulgation, and most other provisions took effect on the thirtieth day, 26 July 2026.

The Act abolished the Public Service Foundation and created the Independent Public Media Board (Független Közmédia Testület), which exercises ownership rights over the public media companies. The Board has nine members: six nominated by parliamentary groups, in equal numbers by governing and opposition parties, serving four years but no longer than until the next Parliament is constituted, and three nominated by media professional organisations serving two years. Members may not have held party office, stood as a party delegate or engaged in party-political activity in the preceding five years. The Board elects the chief executives, decides on supervisory boards and auditors, monitors financial management, approves high-value contracts and commissions an annual independent expert assessment of content.

It is supported by an office, the Független Közmédia Testület Irodája, constituted as a budgetary body. A Public Service Council (Közszolgálati Tanács) of 18 members drafts the Public Service Charter and reviews the annual reports of the public media provider and of MTI; if it rejects a report it may propose terminating the relevant chief executive’s employment. Both chief executives are to be selected through open competition, and candidates are disqualified if in the preceding five years they served as prime minister, minister, state secretary, member of parliament, mayor or party officer. The Media Council expands from five members to seven, three nominated by governing-party groups and three by opposition groups, with the chair filled by competition; members serve four-year terms and the chair five.

The call for applications for the Media Council chair, published on 31 July 2026 sets out the procedure under sections 124 to 126/A of the 2010 Act: the parliamentary Committee on Culture issues the call, Parliament creates an ad hoc nominating committee which hears candidates in public and votes only on those supported by at least one third of its civil professional members, the standing committee then proposes a candidate to Parliament, and the person elected is appointed NMHH President for five years by the President of the Republic on the Prime Minister’s proposal. The application deadline was 31 August 2026.

The new bodies are not yet fully constituted. The Public Service Council selected the three candidates nominated by media professional organisations on 19 August 2026 by secret vote after public hearings, and eight professional organisations objected to the nomination process in a letter on 25 August. By the time Parliament voted, nine media professional organisations had objected to the procedure, on grounds including the publication of the selection criteria only after the nomination deadline, the absence of a reconstructible weighting of those criteria, the exclusion of one candidate for a curriculum vitae exceeding 1,500 characters with no remedy available, and the non-publication of the minutes of the 19 August hearing and of the ballot results; questions were also raised about overlapping institutional roles between members of the Public Service Council and one of the successful candidates, Árpád Kollár. On 8 September 2026 Parliament elected six of the Board’s nine members: Viktor Bálint, Miklós Hargitai and György Szabó on governing-party nominations, and Judit Bayer, Árpád Kollár and Miklós Sükösd on professional-organisation nominations, with Bayer elected chair. Election required a two-thirds majority, the opposition parties’ three nominees did not pass committee screening, and the six members took up their seats on 9 September. The Board held its inaugural session on 17 September 2026.

On 22 September 2026 Parliament elected Gábor Polyák, a media lawyer and academic, as chair of the Media Council by 132 votes to 52, together with Márta Bencsik, Bea Judit Bodrogi and Krisztina Nagy on Tisza nominations and Máté Tóth on a Mi Hazánk nomination. The Fidesz nominee László Szabó received 72 votes to 95 against and the KDNP nominee Ferenc Pindroch 78 to 84, leaving two of the seven seats unfilled; Fidesz and KDNP members left the chamber after the vote. The Council had issued no decisions since the previous members’ mandates ended in early summer, and the NMHH said nearly 60 cases awaited it when its first session was announced for 6 October 2026.

The Media Council held its first meeting on 6 October 2026 and adopted revised rules of procedure as its first item of business, requiring that name-by-name voting results and dissenting opinions be published alongside decisions and their reasons, that verbatim minutes appear on the Council’s website within three working days of signature, and that its meeting dates be published in advance; opposition-nominated members joining later may propose amendments to the rules. Máté Tóth, the Council’s only opposition-nominated member, submitted his resignation on 7 October after his election as a vice-president of Mi Hazánk on 26 September created an incompatibility with Council membership; the party stated that it would nominate András Radetzky, deputy chief executive of Magyar Katolikus Rádió, in his place. The regulator was therefore operating with its chair, Gábor Polyák, and the three Tisza-nominated members, while the remaining seats awaited appointments.

Leadership of the public media remains interim. Dániel Papp, director general since 2018, resigned on 5 June 2026, addressing the termination of his employment to the Media Council chair András Koltay and giving as the reason the restructuring of public media by the newly elected government; Anita Altorjai’s employment as chief executive of Duna Médiaszolgáltató ended by operation of law when the amendment took effect. András Horváth (Horváth P. András) was designated interim chief executive by the parliamentary Culture Committee on 2 July 2026 and remains in post pending the statutory competition.

The corporate reorganisation is also incomplete. Draft resolutions establishing Magyar Rádió és Televízió Nonprofit Zrt. and a separate Önálló Magyar Távirati Iroda Nonprofit Zrt. were submitted to the National Assembly on 7 October 2026 by the Tisza members of parliament István Hantosi and Máté Hende. Under the drafts, the assets required for public service media and content tasks transfer to the new broadcasting company free of charge, the Board decides on their further distribution on the proposal of an asset-distribution committee, contractual rights and obligations pass to the new organisations according to their tasks, and employees’ legal succession and prior service time are preserved. The Board would exercise ownership rights on behalf of the state over both companies and elect their chief executives, supervisory board members and auditors, with approval rights over significant financial matters, but could not alter, dissolve or restructure their core activities, withdraw assets or determine programme or editorial content. In respect of MTI the Board could not order a specific item to be produced, or direct its content, title, publication time, suppression, modification or withdrawal.

Source of funding and budget

The organisation is funded from the central budget and has no licence fee. For 2024 the public media was allocated HUF 140 billion, and the draft budget for 2025 set more than HUF 165 billion, equivalent to HUF 452 million a day, alongside HUF 59.5 billion for the NMHH. The 2026 allocation was set at HUF 154.7 billion, about HUF 10 billion less than in 2025, with HUF 50.4 billion for the NMHH. Central budget transfers in the first quarter of 2026, the three months before the 12 April election, came to HUF 39.6 billion, of which about HUF 23.4 billion went on material expenditure and HUF 7.7 billion on wages, against HUF 40 billion in the same period of 2025; MTVA’s annual report, published on 4 June 2026, recorded an after-tax result of HUF 3 billion to the end of March 2026 against a surplus of HUF 5.6 billion to the end of March 2025.

Act XXI of 2026 retains public financing but changes its governance and budgetary arrangements. A statutory public service contribution, calculated with reference to the number of households using equipment capable of receiving linear audiovisual media services, is to be paid in 12 advance instalments each year from 2027, and the contribution is listed in section 94(1)(a) of the amended Act as a revenue item of the Independent Public Media Board. Under section 108(1) Parliament adopts the budgets of the public service providers for three years at a time, in a separate law on the Board’s unified budget, the first applying from 2028. Section 108(3) establishes a Public Service Budget Council comprising the chief executives of the public service media provider and of the public service media content provider, a member delegated as required by the President of the State Audit Office, and two representatives of the independent experts commissioned by the Board to audit the previous year’s activities; under section 108(8) the Board’s chair convenes it by 30 June, presides over it and does not vote.

MTVA’s function as the fund holding and distributing public media resources does not pass to the broadcaster. It is replaced by a Press Fund (Sajtóalap), a separate entity with its own financial arrangements administered by the Media Council under sections 34 to 36 of the Act, which supports qualifying independent media, community media services, public service programming and press products through tenders decided by professional committees.

The interim leadership stated that it had achieved savings of nearly HUF 7 billion in its first 14 days, a figure covering reductions in contractual commitments and avoided future expenditure rather than an audited financial result. It included decisions ending production content worth nearly HUF 3 billion over the remainder of the year and a one-year extension of the NB I football rights with the Hungarian Football Federation at a reported HUF 4 billion less than the previous contract, with the six-year Tour de France rights signed by the previous management under review. It also reported that nearly 30 hours a day of Hungarian film and archive content had returned to the television and radio channels and that nearly 100 programmes were scheduled to return in the autumn structure.

Payments to staff whose employment ended between the 12 April election and 2 August 2026 exceeded HUF 201 million, including HUF 28.1 million net to Dániel Papp and HUF 7.2 million net to Anita Altorjai. The interim leadership stated that it was examining whether the payments to the two chief executives were lawful as part of a wider audit, and its press office said several proceedings were being prepared that could lead to criminal liability. No finding of unlawfulness has been made.

A collective redundancy process began at the beginning of October 2026, with more than 100 posts potentially affected. The final number, the timetable and the individual decisions had not been announced; reports in September of 600 dismissals were denied by the interim management on 18 September, and the notices went to employees who had been relieved of their duties since July. Staff accepting termination by mutual agreement may receive severance, while those given unilateral termination on conduct grounds would not.

Editorial independence

After the 2010 restructuring the public broadcaster’s output came to reflect the positions of the government. Management dismissed independent journalists and changed editorial direction, and the law granted MTI the exclusive right to produce content for Hungarian Radio, Hungarian Television and Duna Television, removing the programming autonomy those institutions had held before 2010. Editors reported receiving lists of sensitive topics, leaked internal documents and correspondence recorded government intervention in content production at MTI, and independent monitoring and EU-funded research found a consistent pro-government bias. Human Rights Watch reported in February 2024 that more than 1,600 journalists and media workers had been dismissed from the public media since 2010 and replaced with politically loyal staff, and in October 2024 thousands demonstrated outside the MTVA headquarters against state media propaganda.

The European Commission’s 2026 Rule of Law Report, the Hungary country chapter of 17 July 2026, recorded that some progress had been made on strengthening the rules and mechanisms for the independent governance and editorial independence of public service media and on the functional independence of the regulator, and that no progress had been made on the fair and transparent distribution of state advertising, which stakeholder monitoring puts at more than 30 per cent of the total advertising market. The same chapter records three new Council of Europe Platform alerts, including concerns about continued political influence over public service media, and 24 alerts reported through Mapping Media Freedom.

The 2026 campaign produced documented instances of direction. A Telex review found that between 1 and 11 April 2026 MTI mentioned Viktor Orbán in 354 reports and Péter Magyar in 36. The figures measure reports mentioning each politician rather than reports principally about either of them, and do not themselves record whether the coverage was favourable. On 31 May 2026 RTL broadcast internal emails sent to public media staff which set out how coverage of the Tisza Party should be handled, including an instruction on election day to find right-leaning speakers to interpret turnout data because only one narrative was running, and detailed guidance on the prominence to be given to an article about an alleged Tisza energy plan; Prime Minister Péter Magyar called for the immediate departure of both chief executives the same evening.

The organisation subsequently published an account of its own past practice. The full 482-page document compiled by the Pro Domo working group of MTI reporters and news editors, drawing on correspondence, emails and chat messages reaching back to 2015, was released on 18 August 2026 after a 15-page extract in early August. It is organised by topic and chronologically under four categories: suppressed or commissioned news, discarded news, manipulated material, and censored and false news. It covers foreign affairs coverage, and some names in it are redacted. On 31 August 2026 the interim leadership announced a criminal complaint concerning the role of Attila Várhegyi, a former Fidesz politician who had advised the public media since 2019.

The change of government in April 2026 brought a rapid break with the broadcaster’s previous editorial operation. On 7 July the interim leadership suspended M1’s news programming, removed senior newsroom personnel and publicly acknowledged the broadcaster’s record of misinformation: the news broadcast was replaced by a black screen carrying the statement that public media may not lie and an apology for having done so for many years. Kossuth Rádió went off air and was replaced on its frequency by Bartók Rádió, while M4 Sport was unaffected; the channel director of Kossuth Rádió, the technology director and the chief production manager were suspended. M1 resumed scheduled news bulletins on 20 August 2026, after a break of 44 days, initially four a day and from the following day two, and Kossuth Rádió returned with a new programme structure on 24 August. The suspension was presented by management as a measure necessary to rebuild an impartial public service news operation after years of politically directed coverage.

The transition has nevertheless raised new questions about the boundary between institutional reform and political intervention. On 4 August 2026 the interim leadership withdrew its announced appointments of Gábor Hajdú as editor-in-chief of the M1 news programme and Miklós Borsa as presenter, a day after Prime Minister Péter Magyar wrote “Nem hinném…” beneath a Facebook post about the appointments. The broadcaster said the renewed public media’s news service had to restore public trust, and gave no explanation of why the appointments had been approved. Hajdú said the leadership had known his professional background when it asked him to take the post and that he was removed shortly after the Prime Minister’s comment. The sequence demonstrates the vulnerability of newsroom staffing decisions to political pressure during the transition, although no formal government instruction has been established.

Act XXI of 2026 introduced stronger statutory safeguards. Section 91(2) prohibits the Independent Public Media Board from determining the programme structure or the content of programmes and from instructing the chief executives on the employment powers they exercise, while section 102(2) places those employment powers with the Board; the Act also provides for public competitions for the chief executives, a Public Service Charter and annual independent assessments of content commissioned by the Board. The Board began operating in September 2026 with six of its nine seats filled, while the statutory chief-executive selection and the corporate separation remained incomplete. No systematic assessment of editorial output since the August relaunch was available at this update.

Classification rationale

Hungarian Radio and Television remains classified State-Controlled (SC), provisionally.

The classification reflects the extensive record of political control over Hungary’s public service media under the institutional system established after 2010. That record includes government influence over appointments, documented interventions in newsroom decisions, sustained favourable coverage of the governing party and the suppression or alteration of news content. Evidence collected during the April 2026 election campaign demonstrates that the pattern continued until the change of government.

The institutional framework changed substantially after the Tisza Party’s election victory. Act XXI of 2026 abolished the previous governance arrangements, established an Independent Public Media Board with representation intended for government, opposition and media professionals, introduced public competitions for chief executives and prohibited the Board from directing programme content. The new law also requires independent assessment of public media output and provides for a three-year financing framework beginning in 2028.

These changes create a substantially stronger legal basis for editorial independence. Their implementation remains incomplete. Six of the Board’s nine seats were filled in September 2026, with no opposition-nominated members elected, while the successor organisation continued under interim management. The new chief executive had not been appointed through the statutory competition, and the separate incorporation of the national news agency had not been completed.

The transition has also demonstrated continuing vulnerability to political influence over personnel decisions. In August 2026 the interim management withdrew two previously announced newsroom appointments immediately after a public expression of disapproval by Prime Minister Péter Magyar. Although no formal government instruction has been established, the episode raises questions about the practical separation of political authority from newsroom staffing decisions.

The State-Controlled classification is retained provisionally because the broadcaster’s documented history of editorial capture extends into 2026 and the new system has not yet been assessed over a sufficient period to establish a sustained change in editorial practice. The structural reforms and the suspension of the previous news operation provide evidence of a break with the former model, but neither demonstrates on its own that effective editorial independence has been secured.

The next assessment will examine the completion of the Independent Public Media Board, the appointment of chief executives through the statutory competitions, the separation of MTI, the adoption and implementation of the Public Service Charter, and the results of the first independent content review. Particular attention will be paid to whether news coverage since the August relaunch demonstrates sustained impartiality and whether management decisions are taken independently of political authorities.

October 2026