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On October 28, I boarded a flight from Budapest to Zürich to attend the yearly editorial summit of international media conglomerate Ringier, the Swiss parent company of Blikk, the tabloid I had edited since April 2025.

When I landed and checked my phone, I saw a calendar invite from Blikk’s CEO summoning me to an “emergency meeting” three days later. The meeting was labeled “obligatory.” My colleagues back home didn’t know what was happening, so I desperately called our legal counsel, who said: “Iván, I’m not allowed to tell you anything.”

Sixteen years into the regime of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, a notorious enemy of independent journalism, muscle memory kicked in. I soon learned that Ringier, which owned Glamour’s Hungarian edition and numerous other women’s magazines as well as Blikk, had received an offer it could not refuse from a pro-Orbán group called Indamedia.

The deal was finalized while I was in Switzerland. Had the owners told me not to bother going, they would have spoiled the surprise. So I sat in conference rooms for two days with people who knew something I was only going to find out when I landed back in Budapest. When I did, Ringier’s Hungarian CEO was waiting for me in the terminal. He sat me down for a coffee and explained what had happened while I was gone.

The next day, Ringier’s Swiss leadership flew to Hungary and broke the news to my colleagues. On the morning of November 3, the first Monday after the takeover, the new owners were waiting for me in the CEO’s office. They explained that they did not intend to work with me. I told them I didn’t intend to stay.

By Tuesday, a week after I’d received that ominous email at the airport in Zürich, my desk at Blikk was empty. Once again, politics had triumphed over press freedom and the public good in Hungary. It’s a story that has defined my career as a journalist here.

A Press Massacre

When Hungary’s socialist regime fell in 1989, the press did not ride the wave of change. Most journalists who had served the regime stuck around, and many even became loudmouthed political advocates—some for the left, some, perhaps surprisingly, for the right. Hungary was the only country in the former Eastern Bloc in which every major news title survived the transition to democracy.

It wasn’t long before the country’s new leaders realized that the press, trained to be docile, could still be controlled. Even after the rise of online media brought new faces and a modern approach, the government found a way to trample its democratizing hopes. All governments have worn these boots, but no one has worn them quite like Viktor Orbán.

Today, a media conglomerate led by Orbán’s allies, known as the Central European Press and Media Foundation, or KESMA, controls nearly five hundred outlets, all of which echo the government’s every utterance, be it state propaganda or the nastiest smear campaign against Orbán’s enemies. Whoever’s not with them is against them: independent media have stopped getting responses to questions, been kicked out of government press briefings, and had state advertising withdrawn from their pages. Any journalist who doesn’t submit to the government’s pressure campaign is intimidated and labeled a foreign agent of whomever Orbán currently deems his fiercest rival, usually the European Union, foreign billionaires, or, most recently, Ukraine.

I’m a loyal guy. In my thirty-two-year career, I’ve spent six, seven, even twelve years at various news organizations. Almost every time I’ve left a newsroom, it was because politics got in the way of my work.

In one case, I saw my newspaper placed under the guardianship of another outlet to appease political leaders. Elsewhere, an owner fired my editor in chief to bring in someone who was willing to follow political instructions.

I was editing the Hungarian national public radio’s news broadcast when Orbán was elected prime minister in 2010, and I didn’t even wait for his guys to arrive at the door—what followed was not a simple restructuring, more like a press massacre. Later, I worked for a leading online news outlet until its owners revealed their plans to cozy up to the government. Funnily enough, that takeover was orchestrated by the same man who’s now taken over Blikk—two-nil to him, I guess.

Money Talks

Over the past week, I have been asked if I was sure that Blikk’s purchase was political. From the Swiss end, it may not have been; rumor has it that Indamedia paid way above market value. And let’s not forget that Orbán has the power to make any media owner’s life hell with new business and advertising regulations. It was an economic decision—and on those grounds, a reasonable one.

But I’m sure this wasn’t Ringier’s original plan for Blikk. They brought me on in April with an ambitious pitch and a multiyear commitment. They wanted me to attempt the near-impossible: to reposition Blikk, a name synonymous with hardcore tabloid journalism in Hungary, as a one-of-a-kind, sophisticated outlet that skipped loud, outlandish, and clickbait-y stories in favor of current affairs, politics, and economic and cultural coverage. They imagined a twenty-first-century newspaper that experiments with AI, but only to produce even more rigorous journalism.

By the time they finalized the sale, Blikk’s readership had risen, and people had begun noticing the shift in tone. A shift that, as I write this, is being reversed. After three decades in the industry, I was never going to stay at an outlet that doesn’t even pretend to take itself and its readers seriously—let alone one that takes its orders from the government.

Some think Ringier should have held on, that they should have resisted the financial temptation and protected whatever is left of press freedom in Hungary. I disagree. Media ownership is a business, and getting big money is good business. Moreover, why on earth should we expect a foreign interest to save the values that we, as a society and in the media industry, never bothered to protect? It’s up to readers to decide whether to support independent newsrooms. More importantly, it’s up to media owners and journalists to stand up for themselves, to resist the siren song of politics, to avoid becoming activists, to take neither the government’s nor the opposition’s side. As long as we don’t hold ourselves to these standards, there’s no point in blaming others for where we are.

It’s also in the interest of Indamedia to frame the acquisitions as an economic move. After all, they just added Hungary’s most valuable tabloid and some women’s magazines to their illustrious stable, which includes the country’s top online news site, Index, and its leading commercial TV channel, TV2.

A Political Gamble

There’s an old joke in Hungary: workers in a Soviet washing machine factory somehow always end up making Kalashnikovs. By the same logic, Hungarian newspapers bought by Orbán’s business cronies always end up echoing government propaganda.

One of Indamedia’s owners is the president of the supervisory board of MBH Bank, which is owned by Hungary’s richest man, who also happens to be a childhood friend of Viktor Orbán’s. The same owner presides over TV2, whose news presenters openly supported Orbán’s reelection campaign in 2022. Index does “soft propaganda”: it doesn’t deny that criticism of Orbán exists, but it is first in line to run anonymous hit pieces on his political opponents, which often become the basis for government communication campaigns.

This is how we got to the present day, and it explains why Blikk’s purchase was so timely. For the first time in sixteen years, Orbán faces an actual challenger: Péter Magyar, a man who led state businesses and was a lifelong conservative but broke away in 2024 to build a new political party, Tisza, which, with five months to go before the next general election, is polling ten points ahead of Orbán’s Fidesz. No wonder that, when I told a friend in the media industry about Blikk’s acquisition, their reaction was: “Damn, Fidesz must be on the ropes.”

It is, and buying Blikk might be a Hail Mary to hold on to power. Blikk has a large audience—in addition to being the most-read print newspaper in the country, it has a daily online audience of more than five hundred thousand, making it Hungary’s third-largest online publication. Many of those readers are older and live in the countryside, important demographics for Fidesz.

Or maybe Orbán’s party is preparing to lose the election—and already plotting its return. Even if Magyar defeats Orbán, Index, TV2, and* Blikk *will remain profitable thanks to their massive audiences, and they can continue to serve as political vehicles for Fidesz.

Either way, the regime’s survival is at stake, and nothing—certainly not Blikk—is too expensive for the cause.

Once again, journalists are on the losing end of the story. As the industry continues to shrink, I’ve seen many talented colleagues leave the field, or worse, the country, because they’d had enough of the pressure, or couldn’t make enough money to live a decent life.

I’d like to keep doing my job independently and impartially, as I always have. But the odds are not in my favor.

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**Iván Zsolt Nagy is a Hungarian journalist and editor who has led major independent newsrooms in his country over the past decade. He won the 2021 European Press Prize for opinion writing. **