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This book compares media and political systems in East-Central as well as in Western Europe in order to identify the reasons possibly responsible for the extensive and intensive party control over the media. This phenomenon is widely experienced in many of the former communist countries since the political transformation. The author argues that differences in media freedom and in the politicization of the news media are rooted in differences in party structures between old and new democracies, and, notably, the fact that young parties in the new members of the European Union are short of resources, which makes them more likely to take control of and to exploit media resources.--

Abstract: This paper consists of three parts. First, it suggests that a paradigm shift has taken place in political communication, as the advent of social media allows political elites to assert and frame their agendas in more efficient and economical ways than the capture of legacy media. In consequence, a paradigm shift is taking place in media studies as well: because traditional media capture theory does no longer fully account for contemporary media/politics interactions, media systems scholars now study the effects of disintermediation on media and political landscapes. Then this paper returns to traditional media capture theory and discusses some definitional issues. Finally, it recalls how party colonization of the media, a version of media capture theory, accounted for the deficit of media freedom in the former communist countries a decade ago.

During the 2015 migration wave, Hungary was a transit, rather than a target, country for migrants fleeing from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe. In reaction to this, Viktor Orbán's right-wing populist government built a wall on the country's southern border and launched an anti-migration communication campaign, portraying itself as the saviour of European, Hungarian and Christian values. This article reconstructs the messages and effects of this campaign. It finds that in a context of limited political and media pluralism, an anti-migration campaign may exert a significant impact on public opinion and political behaviour.

This chapter investigates how self-regulation could counter inequality of access to the media as a channel for information and expression in the context of the former state-socialist countries. It describes the Anglo-American self-regulatory model that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe attempted to adopt after the political transformations in 1989-1991, observes the failure of the implementation of this model and – through a case study of Hungary – describes some of the dysfunctions of the news media in the region. Further, it suggests that ethical journalism is the highest level of the "Maslow pyramid" of journalistic needs, preceded by acceptable work conditions, job security, a functional market and media freedom, and hence that ethical journalism cannot be pursued as long as the other conditions are not met. More particularly, it argues that the reasons for the failure of the self-regulatory mechanisms in these new democracies to be efficient concern the distortion of the media markets and the deficit of media freedom, among other factors. ; Go to the full book to find a version of this chapter tagged for accessibility.

After the political transformation, Hungarian journalism organizations and media policy makers attempted to introduce the standards and practices of neutrality-seeking journalism, yet most news outlets continued to offer engaged accounts of political events and issues. Why was the professionalization of journalism interrupted? This paper attempts to answer this question by offering an overview of the comparative media systems literature in search of the factors shaping journalism practices and by placing Hungary on the map of media systems. Then it suggests that different audience needs may be an additional factor explaining the dominance of different journalism practices in different media systems, with the public in transition societies seeking confirmation rather than information when using the media.

Media scholars looking into the relationship between political and media systems in the former communist countries have mainly worked on the assumption that parties seek control over the media in order to suppress critical voices and to gain favourable coverage so that they can influence voting behaviour, but have barely explored political actors' other possible motivations. Meanwhile, political scientists studying the region's countries have often focused on parties' relationship to the state and the resources that they extracted from state institutions such as ministries and municipalities but largely ignored the relationship between parties and the media. This article, written as part of the project Media and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, attempts to link these two traditions of research. Introducing the concept of the party colonisation of the media, it looks into what benefits other than suppressing criticism and gaining favourable coverage parties may gain from controlling the media. It uses the example of Hungary to illustrate how the party colonisation of the media works. It also intends to assess how different patterns of media colonisation affect media freedom.