Across Europe, public service journalism is a shield for democracy. But we have to decide if we want to fight for its survival

For 16 years, Viktor Orbán’s government poured millions of euros of public money into thinktanks, institutions and media outlets sympathetic to its illiberal views – not only in Hungary but beyond its borders. In Slovakia, for instance, where a sizeable Hungarian minority lives, Budapest is alleged to have sent millions of euros to favoured media organisations. Many independent newsrooms survived on only a fraction of what these outlets received.

These government-fattened channels were never truly called “media” by Hungarian colleagues, nor their content producers “journalists”. If Hungarians were asked to recall ever hearing from these outlets a piercing human story, an investigation exposing abuse of power or a facts-based analysis that brought clarity to chaos, they would search their memory in vain.

Beata Balogová is a Slovakian journalist and a member of the board of the European Press Prize

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After Georgia Fort and Don Lemon reported from a church whose pastor reportedly works for ICE, agents arrested Fort in front of her children

When federal agents arrived at Georgia Fort’s front door to arrest her, she knew what to do: be a journalist.

Fort, an independent Minnesota reporter who faces criminal charges after covering a protest inside a St Paul church, took out her phone and spoke directly to the camera, livestreaming to her audience that her lawyer advised her to go with the agents. Her three kids were in the house at the time, she said.

Dutch novelist, poet and travel writer who reported on the Hungarian revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall

The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, who has died aged 92, looked and wrote in his later years like an epitome of the suave and cosmopolitan man of letters. A devoted European, he lived in an elegant 1731 merchant’s house in Amsterdam, but spent every summer on the island of Menorca. Nooteboom published almost 60 books: fiction, poetry and travel writing. Stylish, erudite and reflective, they brought him a shelf of major awards including, in 2009, a career-crowning lifetime honour for Dutch-language writers: the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren.

Yet he remained, as he put it in his 2016 work 533: A Book of Days, “a child of the war, and after that the cold war”. In 1940, he had watched from his family’s apartment in The Hague as nearby Rotterdam burned in air raids. In early 1945, misdirected RAF bombs killed his father during the “hunger winter” in which more than 20,000 people died of starvation in the Netherlands. Nooteboom built his urbanity, and seeming serenity, amid ruin and trauma. “I have not remembered chaos,” he said. “I found my way out of all that in my books.”