The opposition Socialists have put forward half a dozen amendments to the Fidesz centre-right government's media legislative package with the aim of ensuring that the public-service media does not become subservient to politics, senior Socialist officials told a news conference on Wednesday.

Fidesz has embarked on a campaign to hold to ransom whatever parts of the media sector cannot be "bought," the Socialist leader Ildiko Lendvai said.

The package's proponent, Andras Cser-Palkovics, said in a statement that Fidesz had got the power "and therefore undertakes the responsibility" to make the system that had been "inoperable over the past few years operable".

He said that Hungarian public television had been functioning without a chairman for a long time and the same was true of the national radio and television authority ORTT. The head of the national telecommunications authority had recently resigned and soon Hungarian public radio would be without a chairman.

The Fidesz politician added that it was the government's responsibility to make sure that the media system, financed by taxpayers, should be more transparent and cheaper to run.

He said that on Thursday Fidesz would put forward compromise measures on amendment initiatives which take into consideration the standpoint of the oppostion, as long as those initiatives would result in a cheaper and more transparent system.

One of the main features of the Fidesz package is a new powerful five-member body called the Media Council which will operate within the new merged authority with a nine-year mandate, and a separate 12-member public-service body is to comprise representatives of social groups, scientists and the churches to replace the individual supervisory boards.

The package also provides for the establishment of an asset management body to support broadcasting and to manage assets related to public media. The public media companies themselves - television networks MTV and Duna, Magyar Radio and news agency MTI - are to be converted into not-for-profit companies.

Lendvai said the Socialist amendments aim to stop news agency MTI from coming under the roof of a supervisory umbrella which covers public radio and television.

Further, the Socialists propose that members of the Media Council should be appointed for a term equivalent to a parliamentary cycle rather than for nine years, and members of the council should be delegated on a parity basis in order to ensure the constitutionality of the eventual law, she said.

The Socialists also want to ensure that members of the 12-member public-service supervisory body should be delegated by representatives of employers, pensioners, Hungarian cultural organisations and journalist associations.

Fidesz's "secretly prepared" and "rushed" media package is the outline of a media system in which all players "from the constitution all the way down to the doorman" would be held on a "short leash", Miklos Haraszti, former OSCE representative for the freedom of the media, said in an interview to be published in the weekly Magyar Narancs on Thursday. According to Haraszti's remarks, sent to MTI on Wednesday, all editorial activities would be subject to substantial control by the proposed new authority, the "open and unilateral political appointee of the ruling party".

Fidesz defended the new media bill package strongly criticised by opposition parties in a parliamentary debate on Monday.

Opposition parties on Tuesday submitted 44 amendments. Only one of the opposition proposals - on tightening up the wording of the document, submitted by radical nationalist party Jobbik - was accepted by the parliamentary majority.

The Fidesz-Christian-Democratic alliance holds the two-thirds of parliamentary mandates needed to change the current outdated media law enacted in 1996.

Fidesz deputies insisted in a debate late on Monday that the aim of the package was to reform "the currently dysfunctional public-service media sector". One of the proponents of the bills, Andras Cser-Palkovics, argued that the public media sphere would be cheaper to operate than at present, as well as being more transparent.