No to “PR coverage for politicians”

Atilla Bátorfy was visibly nervous when he started his session about media corruption in Hungary. But it quickly became clear that he had done his homework and that he knew what he was talking about. During his one-hour session, he painted not so beautiful a picture of his homeland, Hungary.

Bátorfy started by explaining the history of his medium, Kreativ, a small publication that used to do what he calls “PR coverage for politicians”. When a new editor-in-chief, who thought it was time to do some real journalistic work, came on board in 2002, Kreativ’s course of action changed drastically. One of the results was the article they wrote about media corruption in Hungary in the period of 2010 until 2014. As was to be expected, the piece wasn’t equally well received by everyone, but they published it anyway.

Problems along the way

The team encountered several problems during the investigation. For starters, it was a very complex story. They didn’t have a lot of political sources so they had to find other ways to get their information, such as collecting public data. But immediately a second problem arose in that the quality of public data in Hungary is not up to par.

Another difficulty was determining the historical context for the article. In the end the team decided to focus the investigation on media corruption in the period 2010 to 2014, even though of course corruption goes a lot further back.

Corruption revealed

In spite of the difficulties the team had encountered, the team managed to write the article they had in mind. They uncovered or at least confirmed the relationship between the Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, and businessman Lajos Simicska. They also revealed how Simicska had been corrupting the media by placing people he trusted in high-ranking businesses and putting money in the ‘right’ companies.

In the end, the investigation spawned a 82,000-character article. In order to make an article that long accessible for a wider public, the team added graphics and visualisations to make it more attractive and understandable.

By Ann Goossens
Photos © Sofie Defour and Rafael Njotea