Part I — Situation overview

On 8 September 2026 the National Assembly filled six of the nine seats of the Independent Public Media Board, and Judit Bayer became the board’s chair. The board’s task is to supervise the operation of public service media, to protect the independence of the public media and to exercise ownership rights over the public media’s companies. It held its inaugural meeting in mid-September. According to 444.hu’s summary, Viktor Bálint, Miklós Hargitai and György Szabó, nominated by the governing party, were elected for four years, but at most until the formation of the new National Assembly. Judit Bayer, Árpád Kollár and Miklós Sükösd, delegated by media professional organisations, were elected for two years. All six members got in with the votes of two thirds of MPs. For the three seats due to the opposition parliamentary groups, the National Assembly’s culture committee did not support the nominees Beatrix Siklósi (Fidesz), Zoltán Martí (KDNP) and Zoltán Moys (Mi Hazánk) in either of two rounds. Martí withdrew his application on 10 September. According to the committee’s governing-party vice-chair, Márk Radnai, the board can operate with six members as well and can publish the call for applications for the public media’s chief executive. Média1 — as quoted by Mandiner — warned that Section 86(4) of the Media Act opens nomination by media professional organisations only for the case where one of the sides does not put forward nominees, not for the case where the committee rejects the nominees.

On 22 September the Media Council was also constituted: alongside its president, Gábor Polyák, three nominees of the governing party and one of Mi Hazánk obtained a majority, while Ferenc Pindroch, nominated by KDNP (78 in favour, 84 against, 18 abstentions), and László Szabó, nominated by Fidesz (72 in favour, 95 against, 16 abstentions), did not. The new president told Telex that the public media is “in a transitional position”, the call for applications for the chief executive has not yet been published, and the authority will strictly hold public service news programmes and current affairs programmes to account for their balance. On 26 September an integrity dispute over the Media Council election also broke out: according to a video recording, a Tisza deputy group leader also pressed a fellow party member’s voting button. Those concerned speak of “technical assistance”; Fidesz initiated the convening of the House Committee and a criminal complaint. Meanwhile Mandiner, which has passed into state ownership, has been showing only archive content since 10 September.

MIAK has already made proposals on enshrining the nomination order in law (20 August), on preventing operation with an incomplete membership (5 September), and on the vacant seats of the Media Council and the phasing out of state-owned media (23 September). The new element of the current situation is an arithmetical fact: with 141 mandates in the 199-member National Assembly, the governing party’s parliamentary group alone exceeds two thirds, so the two-thirds election threshold today forces no one to negotiate. The board’s legitimacy can therefore no longer come from the manner of its election, but from the decision rule within the board and the measurability of its work. MIAK’s reading: the touchstone is whether the board’s rules would remain acceptable in the hands of a future, opposing majority.

Part II — Foundations in the literature

Three classical authors provide the framework. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva-born philosopher, the classic of the theory of popular sovereignty) gives, in The Social Contract, two rules on how large a majority a decision requires: the weightier the question, the closer the threshold must be to unanimity, and the more urgent it is, the smaller the majority that suffices — a good rule combines the two. This justifies separating the board’s strategic and day-to-day decisions. Alexis de Tocqueville (French political thinker) writes in Democracy in America that if a man with absolute power can abuse that power, a majority is not exempt from this either, and parties may behave towards each other like foreign nations. It follows that the rule must be judged not from the intentions of the current majority, but from the possible abuse by any majority of the day. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (American media researchers) compare in their book Manufacturing Consent the differing press treatment of similar situations, and demonstrate bias from this. The method is direction-independent: it detects bias in favour of or against any government in the same way. The detailed discussion of the literature — by author, with quotations — can be found in section 6.4 Literature in detail.

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures. The first sets out the board’s internal decision rule, the second the measurement of the public media’s balance, and the third the procedure for the decision on the Mandiner assets.

3.1 Double majority for strategic decisions, with the weight of vacant seats passing to the professional group (before the call for applications for the chief executive is published)

MIAK proposes that the Media Act — whose rules on media supervision are cardinal, so their amendment is adopted by the National Assembly by a two-thirds majority — separate the board’s day-to-day and strategic decisions. Strategic decisions should be the selection and dismissal of the chief executive, the adoption of the editorial statute, the annual public service plan and budget, and the disposal of the public media’s assets. For these, two conditions should be required together: the votes in favour of two thirds of the filled seats and, within that, the agreement of at least one member of every filled nominating group (governing party, opposition, media professional) — this is the double majority. If a group’s seats are empty because the committee rejected the nominees, the group’s missing agreement should not be dropped, but replaced by the agreement of a majority of the professional group. In today’s six-member board, electing the chief executive would thus require at least four votes in favour, including at least two professional members and one member nominated by the governing party. The other direction of the rule is protection against boycott: if the members of a group stay away from two duly convened meetings on the same agenda item, their agreement is not a condition at the third meeting, but the decision must be reasoned in writing. Rousseau’s two rules (see 6.4.1) describe exactly this duality. The proposal builds on the A6 checks and balances programme point, and follows the logic of the I10 constitutional stress test: it must be written as if today’s opposition were to exercise it tomorrow.

3.2 A balance measurement repeatable with a public codebook and raw data (codebook by 31 December 2026, first measurement in the first quarter of 2027)

The president of the Media Council announced that the authority will hold the public media to account for its balance, will make the reasoning of its decisions public, and that its work will be reviewed annually by independent experts. MIAK proposes that this accountability be based on a single method, made public in advance, which neither the Media Council nor the management of the public media can rewrite unilaterally. Five elements are needed. First: the sampling plan and the codebook — what is measured, from which period, according to which categories — should be published before the measurement, and may be amended only with a version number and a justification. Second: the raw coded data and the calculation should be downloadable in machine-readable form (D2), so that any researcher, party or journalist can recalculate it. Third: two mutually independent coding teams should work on the same sample, and the inter-coder agreement indicator should be public. Fourth: the central element of the measurement should be paired comparison, that is, comparing the airtime, order and use of sources for government and opposition events of similar weight (see 6.4.3). Fifth: the measurement should be carried out by a research institute selected through an open call, and its results should be compared with the political independence indicators of the Media Pluralism Monitor. The proposal is a methodological supplement to the KU2 media pluralism monitoring: it attaches a repeatability guarantee to the previously proposed indicators.

3.3 A time-limited, reasoned decision on the Mandiner assets, after an expert opinion on diversity from the Media Council (decision by 31 March 2027)

According to its own statement, Mandiner passed into the ownership of the Ministry of Finance after the asset-management foundation ceased on 31 August, the publisher’s chief executive was replaced on the instruction of the finance minister, and since 10 September only archive content has been available on the portal. MIAK’s analysis of 23 September 2026 already described the general rule of phasing out (an asset manager governed by a board, a phase-out plan, archive protection, employees’ rights); MIAK now adds a procedural step to this. The current state — a functioning company, suspended content, an open future — is itself a decision, only an unreasoned one. MIAK therefore proposes that the ministry exercising ownership rights make a decision, reasoned in writing, by 31 March 2027 between the three options (winding up, sale, placement within a public service framework). Before the decision it should request a public expert opinion from the Media Council on how the individual options would affect the diversity of the media market — the president of the body has himself identified the examination of media market concentrations as a task. The expert opinion is not binding, and the Media Council is a body elected by the National Assembly that cannot be instructed by the government, so the opinion is not an approval of the decision but an independent yardstick for it. The decision criteria should be the same as those any future government would apply to a media outlet it takes over (A7).

The common principle of the three proposals is symmetry. A public media rule is good if today’s government majority would accept it even if the other side applied it against it — the double majority makes the decision verifiable, the public codebook the measurement, and the reasoned deadline the fate of the assets. According to Tocqueville’s warning (see 6.4.2), the good intentions of the majority are no guarantee; the rule is.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Institutional legitimacy Strategic decisions (especially the selection of the chief executive) do not depend on the will of a single nominating group; the decision is defensible regardless of the board’s future composition The two-thirds voting threshold and the agreement required from each group may slow down the selection of a leader, and interim management may drag on
Operation of the public media Thanks to the public codebook and raw data, the debate on balance is about data, not impressions The measurement itself may become a target of political attack (“who did the coding?”); if inter-coder agreement is weak, the measurement loses its credibility
Media market A reasoned, time-limited decision is made on the Mandiner assets, and the impact on diversity is known in advance Requesting an expert opinion and public reasoning slow down the decision; the uncertainty in the meantime erodes the value of the assets
Rule of law The rule binds any majority of the day equally, and is enshrined in the cardinal act Because of the professional members’ two-year mandate, the same majority will re-elect them in 2028; if professional nomination does not genuinely remain with the organisations, the double majority is hollowed out

The main dilemma lies between speed and legitimacy. The public media’s transitional state cannot last long, and the double majority may slow down the election of the chief executive. This is exactly why Rousseau’s second rule matters: for urgent, day-to-day decisions a simple majority suffices, and broad agreement is needed only for rare decisions with long-term effects. The proposal tips over to the risk side if the scope of strategic decisions is too broad, or if the agreement of the professional group becomes a formality because the professional members are also selected by the same majority. The rule therefore works well together with the mandate term staggered from the parliamentary cycle and the objective criteria for the circle of nominating organisations, as proposed in MIAK’s analysis of 20 August 2026. The assessment of the voting-button affair under the rules of procedure is a task for the organs of the National Assembly, and the assessment of any criminal complaint is a task for the investigating authority. MIAK takes no position on this; it only notes that the integrity of a body’s election is also part of its legitimacy.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth following? (suggested KPIs)

MIAK proposes following the performance indicators below (KPIs — Key Performance Indicators):

  • Support for strategic decisions by group: what percentage of the Independent Public Media Board’s strategic decisions were supported by at least one member of every filled nominating group — calculated from the public voting minutes. A worthwhile target value: 100% from the entry into force of the rule.
  • Repeatability of the measurement: the date of publication of the codebook and raw data (proposed deadline: 31 December 2026), and by the end of 2027 at least one independent recalculation that shows a deviation of at most 5 percentage points (pp) for the main indicators.
  • Inter-coder agreement: the agreement indicator of the two independent coding teams for every published measurement; the proposed threshold is 0.8, accepted in international content analysis practice.
  • Deadline for the Mandiner decision: publication of a reasoned ownership decision and the Media Council’s expert opinion by 31 March 2027.
  • External assessment: the risk level of the political independence area in the Hungarian country report of the Media Pluralism Monitor in the next two reports.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s key message: the legitimacy of the public media board today does not depend on its election by two thirds, because a single parliamentary group can secure that on its own. It depends on whether the board’s most important decisions can only be taken jointly by several nominating groups, and whether anyone can check the balance of the public media. MIAK asks the legislator to enshrine the double-majority rule before the call for applications for the chief executive is published, the Media Council to base its accountability on a public codebook and raw data, and the ministry exercising ownership rights to decide on the Mandiner assets by a deadline and with reasons.

The proposal is tied to two MIAK foundational values. Ideology-free here means symmetry: MIAK asks of today’s majority the same yardstick that it applied to the earlier media system, and that it will also ask of a future majority. Data-drivenness means that the debate on balance should be settled by data that anyone can download and recalculate, not by the impressions of the participants in the debate.

Part VI — Reasoning and further sources

6.1 Press framing by spectrum

Left-liberal band (Telex, 444.hu, HVG). Telex presented the first interview with the president of the Media Council in the frame of putting things in order after propaganda: the focus was on action against incitement to hatred, the retroactive examination of state advertising, and the statement that “there is no witch-hunt”. From the same interview HVG highlighted the institutional promises: public reasoning for decisions, an annual audit by independent experts, and the fact that the Media Council is operational with four members as well. 444.hu framed things in two directions: it wrote ironically about former pro-government presenters of public television ending up with the opposition parliamentary groups, and in the voting-button affair it presented both the explanation of the Tisza MPs and the letter from Fidesz. The board’s internal decision rule came to the fore at none of the outlets.

Current affairs band (24.hu, Index, ATV). 24.hu and Index reported the restructuring of the media market (Gábor Ziegler’s exit from the Indamedia group) and the voting-button affair as factual news; Index quoted in detail the initiative of the Fidesz parliamentary group leader to file a criminal complaint on suspicion of forgery of public documents. ATV published a video summary of the election of the Media Council (video; based on the title and the short description), and on the voting-button affair a news item built on Mi Hazánk’s recording and the Tisza reaction.

Economic band (Portfolio). Portfolio framed the programme of the president of the Media Council as a review of market-distorting state support, and indicated in its news feed that the split vote of the governing party’s group had triggered a sharp debate: the opposition accused the governing party of breaking earlier political agreements, while according to Tisza the MPs decided on the basis of their own convictions.

Conservative band (Magyar Nemzet, Mandiner). Magyar Nemzet approached the matter from the side of persons: it disputed the Media Council president’s earlier role as an adviser to the opposition and the handling of foreign funding by a civil society organisation, and in a further article it questioned the personal suitability of a board member nominated by the governing party (the latter article was not publicly downloadable). Mandiner’s archive articles — the paper’s content service has ceased — contrasted the statement of the governing-party committee vice-chair with the text of the Media Act, which contradicts it. The paper attributed the dismissal of an M5 channel director — citing sources of a Fidesz MP — to the prime minister’s personal anger. The conservative band thus treats the question of legitimacy as the suitability of persons, while MIAK treats it as the structure of the decision rule.

6.2 Facts and data

Fact Value Source
Number of seats of the Independent Public Media Board 9 (3 nominated by the governing party, 3 by the opposition, 3 by media professional organisations) 444.hu, 8 September 2026; Telex, 10 September 2026
Filled seats 6 (with effect from 9 September 2026) 444.hu, 8 September 2026
Term of mandate parliamentary group nominees: 4 years, but at most until the formation of the new National Assembly; professional nominees: 2 years 444.hu, 8 September 2026
Election threshold two thirds of MPs 444.hu, 8 September 2026
Mandates of the governing party’s group 141 / 199 (70.85%) National Election Office (NVI), 19 April 2026
Media Council president + 4 members elected, 2 seats vacant HVG, Telex, 22–23 September 2026
Rejected Media Council nominees Ferenc Pindroch: 78 in favour / 84 against / 18 abstentions; László Szabó: 72 in favour / 95 against / 16 abstentions HVG, 26 September 2026
Statutory condition for nomination by media professional organisations if the governing or the opposition side does not put forward nominees (Media Act, Section 86(4)) Média1, as quoted by Mandiner, 2 September 2026
Status of Mandiner owned by the Ministry of Finance, only archive content since 10 September 2026 Mandiner; MIAK press monitor, 11 September 2026

As a regulatory framework, Article 5 of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA — Regulation (EU) 2024/1083) is the most important. It requires public service media providers to provide impartial, diverse information, their heads to be selected in a transparent, open and non-discriminatory procedure on the basis of objective criteria, and their early dismissal to be justified and open to challenge before a court. The regulation does not prescribe what voting rule a national public media board should use in its decisions — this is shaped by the member state, and proposal 3.1 fits into this room for manoeuvre. The Fundamental Law leaves the detailed rules of press freedom and media supervision to a cardinal act.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Culture (programme points) — measuring the balance of public service media and media literacy (programme point ID: KU2, KU7);
  • Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points) — the public media board’s decision rule as a check and balance, the management of state media assets (programme point ID: A6, A7);
  • Digitalisation and AI regulation (programme points) — machine-readable publication of the raw data of the measurement (programme point ID: D2);
  • Justice (programme points) — the constitutional stress test of the rules (programme point ID: I10).

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract

In the passage on the threshold of majority decisions, Rousseau starts from the idea that between an equality broken by a single vote and complete unanimity there are many steps, and which one suffices depends on the needs of the community. He condenses this into two rules (in Jonathan Bennett’s English adaptation):

“(i) The more serious and important the question that is being put to the vote, the nearer to unanimity the threshold should be set. (ii) The more the subject of the question calls for speed, the smaller the majority can be allowed to be […]”

Rousseau adds that the first rule suits laws better and the second practical affairs, and that the combination of the two gives the right solution. Applied to the Independent Public Media Board: the selection of the chief executive, the editorial statute and the disposal of assets shape the public media for years — these call for a threshold closer to unanimity, requiring several nominating groups. For day-to-day scheduling decisions, however, a simple majority suffices, otherwise the board would be paralysed. Proposal 3.1 transposes this dual logic.

📖 Source: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract

6.4.2 Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

In the chapter on the tyranny of the majority, Tocqueville argues that a majority can abuse its power just as a single man can, because people’s character does not change by their gathering into a mass:

“If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach?”

In a footnote he adds that parties within a nation can be regarded as smaller nations that are foreign to one another — if one nation can treat another tyrannically, one party can also treat another party in this way. For the public media board this means that in judging the rule, the question is not whether we trust the current majority, but what an arbitrary majority could use the rule for. This is why the symmetry of proposal 3.1 and the fact recorded in Part I — a single parliamentary group alone holds two thirds — belong together.

📖 Source: Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

In their methodological introduction the authors describe how in their case studies they examine the differing treatment of essentially similar situations, where only the political and economic interest at stake differs:

“[…] we examine the differences in treatment of situations broadly similar in character, except for the political and economic interests at stake.”

From this pairing — for example, comparing the press treatment of two similar elections or two similar victims — the book demonstrates bias: from differences in length, placement, tone and use of sources. What matters for MIAK here is not the book’s political conclusion but the method: paired comparison detects bias in any direction in the same way, so it also detects partiality in favour of a current and of a future government. This is why it is suitable as the central element of the repeatable balance measurement under proposal 3.2.

📖 Source: Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent — The Political Economy of the Mass Media

6.5 International comparison

Germany. In its 2014 decision on the supervisory bodies of the public service television broadcaster ZDF, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the proportion of members linked to the state and to the governing parties may be at most one third. The decision indicates that the proportions of a public media board’s composition can be regarded as a constitutional question, not merely as a political bargain.

United Kingdom. The impartiality of the BBC is supervised not by the BBC’s own board but by the independent media regulator, Ofcom, and thematic impartiality reviews are also commissioned regularly. Separating the measurement from the supervised institution is the same principle that proposal 3.2 enshrines with the prohibition of unilateral amendment of the codebook.

European Union. The Media Pluralism Monitor is an annual report of the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom at the European University Institute in Florence, measuring risk levels in four areas — fundamental protection, market plurality, political independence, social inclusiveness. Its public methodology and country reports provide an external benchmark for domestic measurement, but it is an annual, slow-moving indicator; it does not replace programme-by-programme balance.

Culture

  • KU2 — Media pluralism monitoring
  • KU7 — Disinformation resilience and media literacy programme

Transparency and anti-corruption policy

  • A6 — Strengthening checks and balances
  • A7 — Media pluralism as an institutional guarantee

Digitalisation and AI regulation

  • D2 — Open data programme

Justice

  • I10 — Constitutional “stress test”

Proposed new programme point: Double-majority decision rule in the independent public media board — for the Transparency and anti-corruption policy area.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK topic monitor, 27 September 2026 — topic 5; MIAK press monitor, 22 September 2026 — topic 2, 24 September — topic 7, 27 September — topic 8):

Supplementary press sources (on the board’s composition; MIAK press monitor, 9, 11 and 18 September 2026):

Knowledge base references (books):

  • 📖 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract
  • 📖 Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
  • 📖 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent — The Political Economy of the Mass Media

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Culture (programme points; programme point ID: KU2, KU7)
  • MIAK policy area: Culture (background material — media concentration and advertising market distortion)
  • MIAK policy area: Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points; programme point ID: A6, A7)
  • MIAK policy area: Digitalisation and AI regulation (programme points; programme point ID: D2)
  • MIAK policy area: Justice (programme points; programme point ID: I10)
  • MIAK legal foundations (background material) — the relationship between bodies elected by the National Assembly and the government
  • MIAK topic monitor, 27 September 2026 — topic 5, score: 78/100
  • MIAK press monitor, 22 September 2026 — topic 2, score: 90/100
  • MIAK press monitor, 24 September 2026 — topic 7, score: 76/100
  • MIAK press monitor, 27 September 2026 — topic 8, score: 74/100

Supplementary public data sources:

  • Regulation (EU) 2024/1083 of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing a common framework for media services in the internal market (European Media Freedom Act, EMFA), Article 5
  • Media Pluralism Monitor — Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom, European University Institute (Florence), Hungarian country reports
  • National Election Office — final result of the 2026 parliamentary election (19 April 2026)

Generation metadata

  • Input press monitor: MIAK topic monitor, 27 September 2026 (sources from MIAK’s press monitors of 22, 24 and 27 September 2026)
  • Generation date: 29 September 2026, 08:40 CEST
  • Tokens used (total): ~95,000 — estimate, blog generation only; the token data of the source topic monitor is not available (see tokens_breakdown in the frontmatter)
  • Translation: Hungarian original at /blog/2026-09-29-kozmedia-testulet-kettos-tobbseg-ismetelheto-kiegyensulyozottsagi-meres/