Demonstration in support of Népszabadság held in front of the Hungarian Parliament, 8 October 2016. Photo by the authors.Imagine a situation where you woke up in the UK and discovered that the Guardian newspaper had overnight shut down all operations, that its paper version was never to be published again and that its decade old internet archive was unavailable to the public.
For all those citizens who rely on high quality investigative journalism, and the institutions that represent it, this would be an unimaginable situation, and it is very likely that the UK government of the day would have to step in in support of the venerable paper, even if its demise were the result of a problem of liquidity or dwindling circulation.
But if such a scenario would happen in any democratic country and there was even the slightest whiff of political wrong-doing that led to the disappearance of one of the country’s main news portals, heads would immediately roll and the scandal would reverberate for decades to come.
