Hungary's main state TV news channel went dark Tuesday afternoon—and used the blank screen to say it had been lying for years. As DW reports, at 4pm, broadcaster M1 replaced all news and political shows with a black screen carrying an on-air apology: "Public media should not lie. We are sorry for doing it for so long." The message promised a full overhaul to make outlets "independent and trustworthy" and said news was temporarily suspended, notes the Guardian. Prime Minister Peter Magyar, whose new Tisza party won a landslide in April on a pledge to dismantle Viktor Orban-era media control, hailed "the end of propaganda broadcasts." "They lied at night, they lied during the day, they lied on every wavelength. That is now over," he wrote.
Top M1 executives were removed, including its hardline director, and an interim team was installed. At 7:56pm—timed to evoke the crushed 1956 anti-Soviet uprising—M1 resumed with The Witness, a cult satire of Stalinist propaganda. The move follows more than a decade in which Orban's government reshaped both public and private media, concentrating hundreds of pro-government outlets in a single foundation. As DW puts it, "Some content was reminiscent of the fascist, antisemitic propaganda of the period between the two world wars; other content was similar to the output of Russian state media." Orban denounced the shake-up as "a new step in the Tisza Party's tyranny," while many independent journalists cautiously welcomed the reset.
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