The theoretical background for our study are the works studying the intersection of media, politics and media economics we will cite later. Theoretical background and its implications Correspondingly, breaking the data down into distinct government periods paints a clear picture of successive milestones and the changing objectives in the way public funds were used to this end, this also reveals some parallels to the construction of the “illiberal state” as it was announced by Viktor Orbán in the summer of 2014.Ģ. This shift initially benefitted especially Fidesz’s erstwhile most influential oligarch Lajos Simicska, and subsequently, after the break between Orbán and Simicska, it is aimed more generally at funding and ensuring the profitability of the new media empire that was built to serve the government loyally. Our writing highlights the process whereby the allocation of state resources has shifted from considerations revolving around the issue of market balance towards ensuring the channelling of funds to businesspersons aligned with the governing Fidesz-KDNP party alliance.
In our study we look at how the Hungarian state’s advertising practice changed by drawing on data about state advertising from three distinct terms of government.Īs we elaborate below, according to the previous theories of political economy, the government is a rational advertiser that follows basic economic laws, and thus its advertising practices are primarily characterised by commercial considerations. The Hungarian experiences also helped catalyse the realisations that manifest themselves in the Recommendation, in so far as the distribution of state advertising along the lines of particular governmental interests had been ongoing already before the entry into office of the second Orbán government (2010–2014). Although it comes somewhat late, the Council of Europe’s report entitled Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers to member States on media pluralism and transparency of media owners (CoE 2018, 4.7) devotes a separate paragraph to the accountability of state advertising and the relevant transparency requirements, also including policy proposals from some earlier reports (e.g. Another reason behind the surge in interest is that researchers have increasing quantities of reliable, accurate and systematically collected data about the advertising practices of the state sector mostly provided by market research companies like Kantar or Median.
This new trend includes not only the capture of the regulatory environment and of public media, but also the uncontrolled expropriation of the state’s financial resources in the interest of transforming the media market. One of the reasons is the distinct and openly declared media policy pursued by authoritarian or hybrid regimes, which are resurgent in Europe as well (Bajomi-Lázár 2017b). Over the past years, this appears to have changed at least in Hungary and Poland (Bátorfy 2015 Szeidl and Szűcs 2017 Kowalski 2019) and at media conferences. Even as newsrooms and NGOs began to hone in on the state’s advertising practices as part of their activities aimed at monitoring public administration activities in general, unlike the pressures emanating from commercial advertisers, this issue barely figured as a subject of academic investigation in books and studies looking at the relationship between media and politics the problem generally merited only brief references and footnotes. For a long time, media researchers and economists paid only sporadic attention to the government’s role and influence in the advertising market (Besley and Prat 2006 Di Tella and Franceschelli 2011 Gehlbach and Sonin 2014).
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