Aaron says this is Trumpesque, which it is on one level. But really, this is Viktor Orban all the way:
Note the Orwellian “Truth” running behind him.It’s very creepy.
Orban’s method of media dominance probably wouldn’t work here in the US with our media system but the intent is the same. And I could easily see President DeSantis trying some of these tactics. If they can simultaneously weaken the judiciary some of them could work:
As Orbán has consolidated his grip on Hungary, his control of the media is now nearly absolute. In 2010, he cut all state advertising funds to critical news outlets and threatened to sever contracts with private advertisers that continued to support targeted media. The following year, he established a Fidesz-controlled media council with the power to levy bankrupting fines against news outlets that did not favor the Fidesz worldview. Hit on all sides by financial attacks, independent and opposition media began to fail just as news media across the globe were struggling financially to adapt to the online world. It was therefore not obvious outside Hungary that the country’s media companies were failing for different reasons. Once they were sufficiently weakened, however, these starved outlets could be bought for cheap. Orbán’s close friends snapped up many of them at the Fidesz fire sale—at which point state advertising resumed to sustain them. Rather than jailing journalists, engaging in blatant censorship, or simply shuttering hostile media, Orbán let economic pressure do the work.
A crack in the system emerged after the 2014 election, however, when one of Orbán’s most loyal oligarchs, Lajos Simicska, defected and briefly led his media outlets in an anti-Orbán campaign ahead of the 2018 election. Threatened with assassination, Simicska turned over his companies to Orbán loyalists and fled the country. After the 2018 election, Orbán established the Central European Press and Media Foundation, a foundation to which loyal oligarchs “donated” more than five-hundred media outlets to form a right-wing news conglomerate reliably loyal to Orbán.4
Having a pluralistic media landscape matters immensely to democratic health, especially at election time. In 2022, every broadcasting outlet and almost all print media regularly repeated government campaign slogans. The opposition, by contrast, had a hard time getting its message out through the few online news sites, handful of limited-circulation print media, one streaming radio station, and part of a Budapest-only cable-television outlet that covered its campaign. The opposition’s leader, Péter Márki-Zay, got all of five minutes on public television to present his program—on a Wednesday morning. If Hungarian voters wanted to understand what the opposition coalition stood for, they had to hunt to find out. It did not help that the opposition struggled to present a united front. Fidesz also spent ten times more on political ads than did the combined opposition. The ruling party broadcast a loud and clear message that drowned out the opposition’s fuzzy and muted one. And yet, during most of the campaign the united opposition matched Fidesz’s popularity, albeit with polls registering a large “undecided” vote.
Authoritarians need control of the media to function well. It takes time and effort to make it happen. But if anyone’s up to the task it’s Ron DeSantis.