Centralising the Political Information Flow in Media Space. The Case of Hungary.

Illiberal politics are notoriously famous for controlling heavily the flow of information on politics by reducing alternative voices and favouring certain topics, expressions and sources. We aim to evaluate the diversity of political views or stands that are covered by the media outlets during the legislative election campaigns of 2018. Hungary is an excellent case for exploration since the country shows a situation of high risk for media pluralism in the past several years. As the Network Agenda Setting model suggests, news media associate different attributes, such as sources of information, with certain issues, thus casting impact on public mind-mapping on politics. We investigate the network relationship between the media platforms and their preferred content sources. By applying network analysis (the metrics like modularity, clustering coefficient, average path length), the study reveals whether the diversity of sources penetrates the media or rather distinct modules emerge that filter news sources for their members. With the aid of automated process (social listening), the data collection focuses on the most clicked online portals and the digital platforms of the daily newspapers, weekly magazines which have the highest circulation rate in Hungary. It is our assumption that the centralised structure of the media networks is found with the dominance of government-oriented sources and voices.