Hungary's media experience offers a cautionary lesson for Kenya's publicly funded broadcasters ahead of the 2027 elections . [File Courtesy]
Council of Governors Chairman Ahmed Abdullahi is the kind of person who makes you pay attention even when he’s merely teasing you.
Last Saturday, he told me point-blank that he and I were politically on opposite sides. Abdullahi said that by virtue of being a columnist for The Saturday Standard, I had been conscripted into the ‘one-term’ camp.
The Wajir governor was referring to the paper’s string of stinging headlines widely seen to be anti-establishment.
But beneath Abdullahi’s jest lies the reality that perceptions about media firms, and where they supposedly stand politically, will be more entrenched as we head to the 2027 polls. Publicly funded media houses, in particular, will be under intense pressure to serve up ‘balanced’ content. It brings to mind what happened in Hungary recently, where perceptions of the media’s political leanings became part of a bigger national conversation. The decision to suspend news broadcasts on the country’s publicly funded media set a new precedent.
Prime Minister Péter Magyar says M-1 TV and Kossuth Radio had become spin masters. Indeed, on July 7, the stations’ editors made a rare on-air confession that they had betrayed the very principles they were meant to uphold. “Public media shouldn’t lie. We apologise because we did this anyway,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, a recent parliamentary probe delivered a damning verdict on France’s public broadcaster, branding it a bloated bureaucracy out of touch with the taxpayers. Interestingly, tremors from Magyar’s axe have spread far beyond Europe.