In the days following Viktor Orbán’s crushing defeat in the Hungarian parliamentary elections on April 12, social media was flooded with posts thanking independent journalists for their work. As the leader of Direkt36, an investigative reporting nonprofit in Hungary, I received many such messages. Some even credited us for the seismic political change that had taken place.
Of course, that is a huge misunderstanding of our role.
We never pursued political goals with our reporting; we were just doing our job. It just so happened we had to keep on doing it in an environment in which simple acts of journalism carried increasing significance, as other democratic institutions started collapsing under the increasing pressure of Orbán’s authoritarian rule.
What we can take credit for, however, is that at least one democratic function — the watchdog role of investigative journalism — survived this crackdown. In this way, we continued to show the public how Orbán’s system was rotting from within because of enormous corruption, rampant abuses of power, and simple incompetence.
It was not predetermined that independent journalism would be able to stay alive in this tough environment. In fact, in hindsight, it feels a bit like a miracle that it did.
For Orbán, the crackdown on independent media was a priority from Day 1 after he rose to power in 2010. One of the first pieces of legislation his party introduced in parliament was a law that established a new media regulatory authority, led by people loyal to him.
Very early on, they assumed control of the public broadcasters, appointing new leaders who forced out any journalists deemed not friendly enough to Orbán’s agenda. These outlets quickly turned into mouthpieces for the government.
Private media became the next target. Friends and allies of Orbán started buying up formerly independent media outlets and either shutting them down or transforming them into propaganda vehicles.
But what the government failed to take into account was the resilience of Hungarian independent journalists. Many former staff members of the co-opted outlets struck out on their own, setting up new organizations so that they could continue their work.
It was not predetermined that independent journalism would be able to stay alive in this tough environment. In fact, in hindsight, it feels a bit like a miracle that it did.
We were one of the first such groups. My colleagues and I established Direkt36 in 2014 after leaving our previous employer, a popular news site whose owners gave in to increasing political pressure from Orbán until it was eventually taken over by one of his allies.
It was already clear then that the country had entered a dark period. So we made a few key decisions in order to be as resilient as possible against outside pressure.
We didn’t even try looking for investors because we knew from our own experience that political pressure often comes through the business side. Instead, we set up Direkt36 as a nonprofit with a strong focus on raising revenue from the audience through a membership program.
The other key choice had to do with the editorial side. We decided to concentrate on investigative journalism. That, again, was partly out of necessity. We didn’t have enough funds to start a 24/7 news organization. But we also believed that there would be a special need for investigative journalism in this new, deteriorating media landscape.
As Orbán’s crackdown continued, journalists from other outlets that had been taken over followed a similar path. They set up new organizations, also relying on their audience to fund their operations.
These efforts came at a price. The government’s propaganda machinery called us traitors and foreign agents. We faced legal threats, and some journalists, including two of my colleagues at Direkt36, were surveilled with military-grade digital surveillance tools operated by the Hungarian secret service agencies.
Still, the number of new independent outlets kept growing. Most of them were launched in the digital space, because that was the forum least controlled by the government. Luckily, the audience was quickly moving there as well, providing us with a great place for experimentation.
A few years ago, for example, we decided to expand into making documentaries by teaming up with independent filmmakers. We did not have to wait long to see our first big success.
Our second film, “The Dynasty,” about the vast business empire built by Viktor Orbán’s family, was released on YouTube in February 2025. It was viewed 1 million times in less than two days. Now it has more than 4.2 million views, making it the most-watched Hungarian-language public affairs-content on the platform. (Most of the views came from inside Hungary, which has a population of less than 10 million.)
The film reached people who otherwise did not follow the news closely or who usually got their information from propaganda outlets. They included one of my old friends from my hometown, a bastion of rightwing politics, who told me that our film opened his eyes. Having watched mostly propaganda-fueled television before, he said he had no idea about how Orbán’s family members had become enormously rich through state deals and public funding.
That film was just one example of the power that independent journalism could still have in an otherwise autocratic environment.
On March 24, just a few weeks before the election, my colleague Zsuzsanna Wirth and I published a story that sent shock waves throughout Hungarian politics. We reported how government-controlled secret services had tried to cover up an IT hacking operation against the main opposition party.
Opposition leader and now Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar called the revelations “Hungarian Watergate.” But the story was not over. The next day we published a video interview with a whistleblower, police detective Bence Szabó, who had insider knowledge about the secret service cover-up.
That interview blew up the internet, generating millions of views and triggering chain reactions that prompted several other people, including government and military officials, to speak on the record to other independent outlets and on social media about the corruption and abuses of power of the Orbán government. With revelations unfolding every day, and the government scrambling to respond, it seemed like a house of cards was quickly collapsing.
These events serve as a reminder that powerful journalism still matters, even in today’s crazy, chaotic, noisy world.
Now, with the election behind us, our path is clear. We have to continue digging up the hidden stories of the past, while holding the new people in power to account. For if the last 16 years have taught us anything, it’s that democracy stands no chance without independent journalism.
András Pethő, NF ’20, is co-founder and executive director of Direkt36, an investigative journalism center in Hungary.
