Interviewees unanimously disclosed not having had any experience with interference from advertisers or sponsors in their daily news reporting. At the same time, they only displayed very limited knowledge of the income streams of the news brands or companies they worked for. Income streams are mentioned in the annual reports of private and public news corporations, but figures tend to be deliberately vague. For example, public broadcaster VRT is funded through a combination of direct government funding and commercial activities, of which the maximum revenues per year are capped explicitly in the management agreement with the Flemish government.
Due to the small size of the Flemish media market, large, overt cooperations had for a long time been non-existent, or at least not visible to the mass audience. This has changed in the past year, with the Belgian-Dutch media company DPG Media explicitly stating that both journalistic and branded content is now semi-regularly created at the (financial) request and behest of advertisers, which could turn out to be a slippery slope towards more direct involvement of advertisers in news content.
Regarding interventions by shareholders and politicians, opinions and reflections showed a clear division. Shareholders of Flemish media brands tend to remain mostly anonymous, and there is a robust system of editors-in-chief against them trying to interfere with news reporting. However, the situation appears to be different when looking at politicians. Nearly all interviewees, independent from one another, indicated that certain politicians of parties from both the left and right side of the political range intermittently contacted newsrooms to openly voice their dismay at chosen frames, or the presence or absence of certain quotes or even people in the news output of journalists. Of these, the right-wing Flemish nationalist – and currently the largest – political party, N-VA, was mentioned the most for such interference. As many sources regularly indicated, politicians and journalists tend to be much closer on personal levels due to the Flemish media market and its society’s small size.
