Journalists associations
As the Hungarian journalism community is divided along political cleavages, there are several journalists associations, including the Hungarian Journalists Association (associated with left-wing/liberal journalists), the Hungarian Journalists Community (associated with right-wing/conservative journalists), the Hungarian Association of Catholic Journalists, and the Protestant Journalists Association. Membership in an association is not mandatory for journalists to pursue their profession, and especially the younger generation is reluctant to join any of the above organisations. All of these associations have codes of ethics as well as ethics commissions. The deeply divided nature of the journalism community, however, makes self-regulatory efforts largely ineffective: as ethic codes are only binding for the members of an association but not for other journalists, transgressions of journalism ethics have rarely entailed any moral or professional consequences in recent years. Divisions within the journalism community have also hindered the ability of these associations to counter the political and business pressures exerted upon journalists.
Publishers are gathered in the Hungarian Publishers Association which is, according to its credo, to represent the interests of the publishers of print outlets vis-à-vis the government, political parties, and business interest groups. It has an ethics code, passed as a co-regulatory effort in association with the National Media and Telecommunications Authority.