Information regarding ownership of leading news media is published once every year and is available online. However, citizens in Greece, for the most part, retain a fragmented image of leading news media in terms of their operational status and ownership identity. Media organisations are not required to release relevant reports on press or electronic media, and therefore, information is occasionally provided either by universities or research institutes conducting studies on media market, or by regulatory authorities held responsible for supervising media outlets’ operations according to the existing laws.
In the case of broadcasters’ transparency, ownership information is achieved through NCRTV’s intervention, requesting media owners to submit on an annual basis a series of documents for updating the Business Register kept in the Transparency Control Department of the supervising authority. All collected data related to shareholder composition of radio and television stations are available online on the NCRTV’s website (NCRTV, 2020a, 2020b). Another regulatory authority having access to information concerning the ownership of leading news media is the HCC, with a mission of maintaining or restoring the healthy competitive market structure. In this context, among other duties, it precautionarily controls the effect on the competition of business concentration, as provided in articles 5–10 of Law 3959/11 (Hellenic Competition Commission, 2020).
Despite the regulatory framework (Law 2328/1995 and Law 2310/2005), the field was unregulated. In effect, information regarding ownership of leading news media is usually not available, or is only available to experts. However, the dissemination of such information depends on the discretion of the media outlet. Occasionally, universities or research institutes, in the context of relevant projects, discuss critically the ownership status of Greek media, but the provided data are usually not detailed. Journalists’ unions and regulatory authorities keep records of ownership status of leading news media. However, in the past – and particularly in the “golden age” of the broadcasting sector (1990–2004) – there have been cases in which the ownership status of some media outlets was difficult to be fully and accurately identified, even by the NCRTV.
Last but not least, transparency of public funding received by the media outlets has frequently been questioned, raising serious counterclaims between the political parties. Indicative is the case of the last campaign, “We Stay Home” – “We stay safe”, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, whose cost amounted to a total of EUR 20 million. The government spokesperson was asked persistently to release the exact amount given to each media outlet that received state advertising, as there was strong criticism focusing on the fact that in this list of 1,232 media outlets involved in the campaign, there were websites of very low traffic and readership, or even non-existent websites.
