Ellenpont.hu

» see ellenpont.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Ellenpont.hu was ten months old when it stopped. The Hungarian political portal appeared in the summer of 2025 inside Mediaworks Hungary Zrt., the publishing company at the center of the pro-government media bloc, and on 12 August 2025 444.hu named the person running it: László Gábor, who had previously edited Origo.

Telex and Media1 both read the launch the same way. The copy went after Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party, with a recurring attempt to tie them to Volodymyr Zelensky, and Media1 filed the result as another KESMA propaganda title. The masthead carried seven names on day one. The archived masthead of 7 July 2026 was down to the publisher, the responsible publisher, the editor-in-chief and an editorial email address.

The last regular article went up on 18 June 2026. On 29 June something new did appear: a correction the Fővárosi Törvényszék had ordered the paper to publish. Media1 noticed the silence in July and wrote that nothing fresh had been posted for close to a month. Kreatív Online connected the stop to the layoffs and portfolio cuts running through Mediaworks that June, the same round in which the publisher suspended Ripost.hu and Metropol.hu and cut several hundred jobs. Mediaworks never said whether Ellenpont was paused or finished.

~ the dossier ~

~ the correction ~

The text it was ordered to print reads like a summary of the whole operation. Zsolt Ruszin, an auditor and deputy chair of the Hungarian Bookkeepers' National Association, sued over articles from November and December 2025 and won. Media1 reported the first-instance ruling and Kreatív Online reported in July 2026 that the judgment had become final. The correction said the paper had falsely written that Ruszin was of Ukrainian origin and that Ruszin was a backroom figure for the Tisza Party with strong Ukrainian political and business connections.

So the final two items on Ellenpont.hu were a piece of politics and a court saying the politics was untrue.

~ the house it was built in ~

One earlier episode got national pickup. In 2025 Ellenpont and several other government-friendly outlets tried to attach a property in Balatonfüred to the family of Ágnes Forsthoffer, a deputy chair of the Tisza Party. Media1 later reported that the house belonged to János Mészáros, sibling of Lőrinc Mészáros, and to János Mészáros's wife. HVG wrote that Ellenpont eventually conceded it had photographed the wrong house, without naming who actually owned it.

Media1 called it a propaganda title at launch and the record it left over ten months fits that description more than it fits a newspaper. It arrived with an election cycle and it went off inside a cost-cutting round, with a libel-shaped judgment against it in between.

~ what the archive holds ~

The Internet Archive's first capture of the new site is 7 August 2025, about seven and a half kilobytes. The homepage keeps answering through 16 July 2026, a month after the writing stopped, then returns a server error on 24 August. Today ellenpont.hu has no DNS record at all.

~ from here ~

I never read this one while it was alive and had no reason to. It published in Hungarian, aimed at a Hungarian election cycle, for ten months across 2025 and 2026. What puts it on this list is the shape of the ending. A publisher stood up a title with a full masthead and then let it stop without ever posting a sentence to say the thing was over.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »