When Foreign Support Becomes a Liability: Funding Independent Journalism in the Authoritarian Media Landscapes of Russia and Hungary

Abstract

This dissertation looks at the challenges and opportunities of independent newsrooms in Russia and Hungary—with a focus on financing. Unlike in the past, when authoritarian governments often relied on outright censorship, physical threats, and imprisonment to silence the independent media, a shift towards softer methods can be observed in the first two decades of the 21st century. The preferred weapon of choice of authoritarian governments is orchestrating media capture. As media markets are increasingly enervated, and old business models of news media are failing worldwide, governments can utilize a set of covert measures, by which they create dependencies that effectively prevent media outlets from living up to their watchdog role. These measures are, among others, ownership changes, market manipulations or the selective distribution of state advertising. There is an extensive body of literature both on the problems of news media business models and the pressures that originate from authoritarian governments. However, there has been limited attention so far on the interconnections of the two phenomena: the literature on media financing predominantly focused on the problems of Western journalism, while most of the works on authoritarian state pressure—especially in my countries of interest, Russia and Hungary—have disregarded the relevance of business models in restricting news media. This work aims to fill this void.