“This is what the government would like to teach society — that there are no reliable sources at all among those who criticize the government,” explained Attila Batorfy, who tracks the Hungarian media for Atlatszo.

Hungary was especially vulnerable to this kind of takeover. The country became a democracy only in 1 989. And government advertising for everything from the national lottery to the state opera is still a key source of revenue for media companies, and has long been doled out to friends.

Still, journalists I met in Budapest were struck by how quickly the press had changed, and that all it took to break this pillar of democracy was a combination of money and fear. “It’s not Russia,” Csaba Lukacs told me. “No one thinks that someone will be shot. Everyone thinks that he will lose his job. It’s enough.”

Mr. Lukacs was a senior reporter at Magyar Nemzet, an 80-year-old daily newspaper that closed in April. (Its government advertising evaporated after its owner broke with Mr. Orban.)

In May, Mr. Lukacs and two dozen former colleagues started a weekly called Magyar Hang (Hungarian Voice), which operates out of a one-room Budapest storefront. Most of its issues have no advertisements, because companies fear drawing the government’s ire by association, Mr. Lukacs said. The paper is printed across the border in Slovakia, because no Hungarian printer would do it. “One of the biggest problems is that people are afraid to be subscribers,” he added. Its journalists worked unpaid for the first two months. Now they sell enough copies — just under 10,000 per week, mostly at newsstands — to pay themselves the minimum wage.

Magyar Hang is a conservative, center-right newspaper — no more radical than The Wall Street Journal. Some of its writers, including Mr. Lukacs, used to support Fidesz. But because they’re willing to criticize the ruling party and report on official malfeasance, the government hasn’t credentialed its reporters, so they can’t attend its news conferences and question officials there, Mr. Lukacs said. And no state entity responds to their calls.

“If we ask someone from the governmental hospital, ‘How many cases of infections?’ they will not answer us,” he said. “For Fidesz, it’s not enough to be loyal, you have to be servile. You have to follow their instructions without questions, without any doubt.”