M1, the flagship news channel of Hungary’s public media, went dark on Tuesday, 7 July, after the newly installed interim leadership of MTVA suspended news programming and published an extraordinary apology for what it described as ‘years of political distortion’.
‘Public media must not lie. We apologize for having done so for many years,’ read the message displayed on M1 and published on hirado.hu. ‘Public media is now transforming so that it can be independent and credible in the future. News service is temporarily suspended. Stay with us.’
The move came hours after András Horváth, the interim director-general appointed to oversee the restructuring of Hungary’s public media, arrived at MTVA’s headquarters with a new transition team. According to the public broadcaster’s own statement, the group’s task is to audit the organization’s operations, manage the institutional transition, suspend propaganda, and renew the news service on professional grounds.
Before the black screen appeared, the shift was announced in unusually blunt terms on M1 itself. Presenter Csaba Radnai read out that the new leadership’s mandate included ‘the suspension of propaganda’ and the creation of a public media system that would be ‘credible, objective and independent’ after the previous years.
MTVA said M1 would resume broadcasting at 19:56—a reference to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the communist regime—in a temporary format, showing films but no news programmes. Kossuth Rádió was also taken off its regular news-oriented schedule and temporarily replaced with Bartók Rádió programming. The changes do not affect M4 Sport, whose broadcasts, including World Cup matches, will continue uninterrupted.
The blackout was framed by MTVA as the symbolic end of an era. Hungarian Television has rarely shown a black screen since its launch on 1 May 1957, usually only during technical failures or periods of national mourning, including after the death of József Antall, Hungary’s first freely elected post-communist prime minister, in December 1993.
The move marks the most visible stage yet in the Tisza government’s attempt to dismantle what it calls the Orbán-era system. Parliament passed a major media-law overhaul in late June, abolishing the old Media Council’s mandate, creating a new public-media oversight structure, separating MTI into an independent news agency, and replacing the MTVA–Duna Médiaszolgáltató model with new public-service institutions.
Horváth, a lawyer rather than a media executive, was appointed by Parliament’s Culture Committee last week to conduct the legal and financial audit until permanent leaders are selected through a later public competition.
The unprecedented development came as Parliament is debating the 17th Amendment, the flagship measure of the so-called ‘Operation Purgatory’, a legislative package introduced by Prime Minister Péter Magyar to ‘purge the political, economic and institutional networks’ built during former prime minister Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power. The proposed amendment would remove President Tamás Sulyok from office on the day after its adoption, establish a new asset-recovery and anti-corruption authority with extensive prosecutorial and law-enforcement powers, and introduce a 12-year term limit for members of Parliament.
Fidesz has denounced the wider restructuring as a politically motivated takeover carried out under the banner of democratic restoration. Opposition politicians have also criticized Horváth’s appointment and the media transition process for proceeding without proper procedural safeguards, public hearings, or broad consultation. More broadly, the former governing party argues that the Tisza administration’s campaign against Orbán-era institutions is sliding towards authoritarianism under the pretext of restoring the rule of law.
Speaking during Tuesday’s parliamentary session, Fidesz MPs compared the public media blackout and the accompanying apology to the Communist era, declaring that Hungary was witnessing the ‘death of democracy’.
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