How Hungary’s journalists are fighting their strongman — and what American media under Trump can learn from them
- - How Hungary’s journalists are fighting their strongman — and what American media under Trump can learn from them
Charles SennottNovember 11, 2025 at 3:56 AM
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I was supposed to be in Vienna today at the 75th annual World Congress of the International Press Institute, where I am proud to have been a member of the North American Committee for the last 15 years.
From there, the plan was to ride the train to Budapest, Hungary, to visit some of the independent newsrooms who this year were collectively recognized by IPI with the IPI-IMS Free Media Pioneer Award for their “innovation, adaptation, and endurance under sustained political and economic pressure.” I was looking forward to seeing what we can learn from a place that has endured under an authoritarian regime and managed to hold onto hope in a way that should cause reflection and inspiration for us here in the United States.
But last week, I canceled all of my flights.
Instead of setting out for Vienna and Budapest which I would love to be visiting, I decided to stay in the small, ramshackle newsroom of the Martha’s Vineyard Times, where I serve as publisher and where we are doing the daily grind of local journalism.
An unexpected development that required my full attention made me change my plans, but staying right here in our local newsroom at The Martha’s Vineyard Times covering “real news for real Islanders,” as our motto goes, honestly, feels like exactly where I should be. This is the right vantage point to understand the moment of vast economic inequity that we live in amid the rise of authoritarian regimes and the impact they are having on undercutting an independent press on top of chronicling the day to day lives, events and achievements of our community. The fight for the future of journalism will be fought on the local level, and so I feel like I am very much on an unlikely frontline of that struggle.
In our newsroom this week, we are looking at the impact of climate change through the lens of coastal erosion; we are keeping our eye on the looming threat of more ICE raids on our vibrant community of immigrants, mostly from Brazil, who are living in fear; and, not to be overlooked, we are also reporting the results of the 80th annual Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby! Yes, this fishing story is more important than it might seem on the calm surface of the water where anglers are waiting for a feeding frenzy of bluefish to suddenly break. I deeply believe in the importance of the coverage of the fishing tournament as exactly the kind of journalism that is missing when local newspapers die. It is the kind of event that binds communities together and produces epic stories that are told and retold, an example of what has been called “cohesion journalism,” but which I would just call a great local story.
And, as I learned as co-founder of Report for America, and in the two years I have served as a local publisher, it is one hell of a struggle to try to make a local newsroom sustainable! So, despite all of the international reporting I have done through the years and the work I can still do thanks to some modest funding for GroundTruth Media Partners, I find myself more committed than ever to living out the larger point I have tried to make through several decades as a social entrepreneur in media: all global news is local, and all local news is global.
One of the prouder examples of that local-global journalism was a series of articles and a podcast season we published in 2019 on the GroundTruth Project website in partnership with The Atlantic magazine and with support from GBH, the public media powerhouse in Boston. The project was titled “Democracy Undone: The Authoritarian’s Playbook,” and it described the strategies and “plays” democratically elected leaders in seven countries were using to undermine the systems and institutions that allowed them to reach power, and how similar they were, despite operating in different political structures.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
