Both public broadcasting and privately held media operations across Hungary have been undergoing notable changes in the weeks following Viktor Orbán's departure from the prime ministership in April. Following 16 years in which state-owned broadcasters came to be viewed as conduits for political messaging under Orbán's administration, media workers and journalists across the country are working to reestablish editorial autonomy and recover the confidence of the public.

At the time Antónia Mészáros took on the role of host for the formal relaunch of M1, Hungary's primary public television channel, the broadcaster had only a reduced number of staff in place. A number of staff had already departed or been let go by the time Orbán was removed from his position.

Prior to her role at UNICEF, Mészáros built a career in Hungarian public broadcasting as a journalist, departed that position during a round of staff cuts in 2011, and later hosted a talk show in Hungary for a period. When Péter Magyar took office as prime minister in April, a broad reorganisation of Hungary's state-owned media outlets got under way.

Broadcasters and publishers of every stripe — spanning state-funded and commercially operated outlets alike — are reshaping their coverage practices to meet a political landscape where holding government to account has returned as a baseline expectation. Hammer, who holds an associate professorship in media and communications at Budapest's ELTE University, told reporters the moment presented a rare opening — one he believed offered a chance to rebuild from the ground up.

The speaker described the loss of everything as something they personally viewed as a form of privilege, while employees at public broadcaster MTVA are navigating a broad round of organisational reviews and structural changes. Speaking on the condition that their name not be used — having returned to the public broadcaster after more than a decade away and lacking authorisation to speak with the press — a member of staff described a workforce split between those who viewed the coming changes as an opportunity and those who harboured doubts about their own job security, noting that a number of colleagues had experienced what they described as a sense of relief over the shift in the station's political direction.

A staff member described colleagues who stayed on as ranging from those deeply anxious about what lay ahead to seasoned journalists and editors whose work had not crossed into propaganda, adding that the programming now airing was produced without political intent and that the situation resisted any simple categorisation.

Over the course of several years, Atlátszó — an investigative outlet operating out of a Budapest building with historical roots — published reporting that brought a series of corruption allegations tied to the Fidesz administration into public view. Bodoky, who edits the outlet, described a pattern in which news organisations operating independently of the government faced mounting hostility during the Fidesz era, with some targeted by campaigns that cast them as instruments of foreign influence.

Bodoky characterised the web of state-financed media outlets built under Fidesz as a structure that has begun to unravel. Reliance on public money — channelled through state advertising budgets and government communication programmes — had long underpinned those outlets' viability, and the withdrawal of that backing has left them without a financial foundation.

The change in government has brought its own set of complications for outlets such as Átlátszó, placing them in territory where reporting that scrutinises the new administration risks drawing accusations of alignment with Fidesz — a reputational tension that had no parallel under the arrangement that preceded it. Bodoky observed that readers and donors appear to treat the political shift as a resolution of sorts, with Orbán's exit dulling the sense of urgency around financially backing independent journalism and leaving audience contributions below earlier levels.

On the question of what the new political order actually means in practice, Bodoky held that conduct — specifically whether a public broadcaster asks probing questions and holds those in power to account — would be the clearest measure of how much has genuinely altered. He raised questions about Prime Minister Magyar's practice of using Facebook as a primary channel for public communication, and pointed to the prime minister's ties to individuals holding positions of influence — among them his brother, who holds ownership of Kontroll, a privately run political media outlet — while calling on state institutions to provide substantive responses when journalists put questions to them.

Her career in public media predates the period when Fidesz assumed governmental authority. Boundary markers had been advancing incrementally for some time. Editorial authority displaced the discretion reporters had previously held over their own work. Use of the term "refugee" was barred from official language.

Having chosen to leave her post through a voluntary redundancy scheme, she now operates an independent YouTube channel — and she speaks about the current media environment with measured hopefulness, pointing to the return of dissenting voices on public television as one indicator of change. Zoltán Varga, who heads Central Media, among Hungary's largest privately owned media groups, traced that shift in part to a professional conscience he observed among journalists working outside the state broadcaster, while also noting that the governing party had substantially altered the structure and character of public service broadcasting in the country.

Allegiance to the party, rather than to the nation, was what those individuals were required to demonstrate. "Shifting ingrained patterns of conduct tends to be a process that unfolds over a considerable stretch of time."