Total Centralisation and the Illiberal Takeover

The patterns of media capture in Visegrad

30 November 2018

Edit Zgut-Przybylska

Visegrad Insight Fellow

In illiberal regimes, it is not necessary to imprison dissident journalists massively á la the Turkish method; due to the shrinking market opportunities, it is sufficient to capture enough of the media landscape.

This phenomenon is increasingly common in the Visegrad countries leading to the deteriorating media freedom indicators, where another 2/3 majority of Viktor Orbán resulted in an unprecedented centralisation in Hungary.

A policy of subterfuge

No investigation is going to be launched against the reporter working for US-owned TVN who was about to be questioned by the Polish Homeland Security Office for propagating Fascist materials. The incident in question involved the journalist Piotr Wacowski who infiltrated a neo-Nazi group last year and filmed the group celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday in a Polish forest.

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Edit Zgut-Przybylska

Visegrad Insight Fellow

Visegrad Insight Fellow and re:constitution fellow. Political scientist and sociologist, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Vice-president of Amnesty International Hungary and a guest lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department of the United States. Focusing on informal power and populism in the context of Hungarian and Polish democratic backsliding.

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