Sometimes the most powerful message is a black screen. On July 7, at 4 p.m., Hungary's public television M1 went dark, and a white sentence appeared on the screen: "Public media must not lie. We apologise for doing so for years. Public media will now be reorganised to be independent and credible." At the same time, all news and political programmes on Hungarian public television and radio were cut off.

To grasp the weight of this moment, you have to know what came before it. For more than a decade, the government of Viktor Orban turned public media into a propaganda machine - systematically spreading debunked narratives about migrants, about George Soros, about the EU, about Ukraine, some in a tone that recalled the propaganda of the 1930s. These were not media that occasionally err; this was a tool of power, paid for with citizens' money.

The turn came after the election. Following Orban's electoral defeat on April 12, the new prime minister Peter Magyar and his Tisza party put media reform at the heart of the campaign - and are now carrying it out. The director and most of the programming staff have been replaced, and that evening the television returned to air with a Hungarian film from 1979, a political satire about Stalinism. The symbolism could hardly be clearer.

"A historic day. Today the propaganda broadcasting in the public media ends. They lied day and night, on all frequencies. That is over now," Magyar wrote. It sounds fine - but it is worth holding on to a little scepticism here. Every new government that takes over the media promises independence; the question is whether the new people will genuinely build a free public service, or just turn the same apparatus to their own advantage. For a region that knows both versions up close, the Hungarian black screen is both a hope and a reminder: a medium that once served power can easily serve it again, only a different power.