In April, Matej Voda reported on new coronavirus-related legislation in Hungary which could lead to journalists being jailed for up to five years, further squeezing Hungary’s shrinking independent media. Now Hungary’s leading independent news site is under threat.

The editors of Index say their independence is in “grave danger” following management changes within a news organization that is one of the last remaining critical voices of Viktor Orban’s government.

Under the guise of addressing falling advertisement revenue, Index’s board of directors moved to outsource the paper’s reporting to external businesses and dismissed editor-in-chief Szabolcs Dull from the board on June 21. The announcement plunged Index into turmoil, with its CEO stepping down on June 23, followed by the resignation of his replacement in the same week. Index continues publishing, with editor-in-chief Szabolcs Dull writing on the website, “We don’t have a CEO, we know little.”

The changes at Index, which launched in 1999, follow a pattern that has brought a number of Hungary’s once-independent media outlets under the control of the government, according to Dalma Dojcsak, a lawyer at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union in Budapest. “Everything is presented as a tool to make Index work better and to serve its owners better,” said Dojcsak. “It’s a sophisticated tool to blur the lines of the story and to distance the whole issue from the government.”