The Hungarian media system under political pressure

Péter Bajomi-Lázár (1969) is a Professor of Mass Communication at the Budapest Business School. He worked as the editor of the Hungarian media studies quarterly The Media Researcher (Médiakutató) between 2000 and 2016 and as a Senior Research Fellow with “Media and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe,” a European Research Council project based at Oxford University between 2009 and 2013. In 2002, he was granted the Hungarian Pulitzer Memorial Award for his book on Hungary’s media war (A magyarországi médiaháború, 2001). His latest monograph is Party Colonisation of the Media in Central and Eastern Europe (The Central European University Press, 2014). His latest edited volume is Media in Third-Wave Democracies: Southern and Central/Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective (L’Harmattan, 2017).

Agnieszka Stępińska is a professor at the Faculty of Political Science and Journalism at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her main area of research is political communication. She has been also conducting studies on journalism and media content. She participated in several international research projects, including Foreign News on TV, the COST Action IS1308 “Populist Political Communication in Europe: Comprehending the Challenge of Mediated Political Populism for Democratic Politics,” and “Journalistic Role Performance Around the Globe.”