Similar to the previous study in 2011, all editors-in-chief interviewed insisted that journalistic work was not interfered with by individual advertisers or any other external parties. However, this was by no means because there would not be any attempts to influence journalistic decisions, but because the firewalls were in place and external influence was determinedly rejected. The editors-in-chief may feel pressure, but they gave assurances that it stopped there. According to representatives of leading commercial news media houses, in general, both advertisers and politicians know the extent to which they can influence a newsroom. There have been some difficult cases in the past, but both the times and people are not the same as before.
The funding system of public service broadcaster Yle was reformed in 2013 by replacing the licence-fee system with a special public broadcasting tax. In addition to creating a system with lower fees and a larger pool of payers, the designers of the reform attempted to further insulate Yle from the state, financially speaking. Introducing an automatic annual index raise to keep the level of income steady, instead of annual government proposals for parliament decisions, achieved this. In 2014, the tax model turned out to be at least as vulnerable to budget pressures as the licence fee, as the index raise was granted only once in the first year (Karppinen & Ala-Fossi, 2017).
This ongoing struggle over the fair level of Yle financing was the context of the so-called Sipilägate in late 2016, when Yle published a news story about how a contract was awarded by a state-owned mining company to one owned by relatives of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä. This bothered him so much that he sent a series of oppressive emails to both the journalist who had written the story as well as to the editor-in-chief of Yle News, Atte Jääskeläinen. Very soon, three journalists resigned from Ylebecause they felt their editor-in-chief had let them down under pressure from the prime minister (Koivunen, 2017).
Jääskeläinen retained his position through this crisis, but he was forced to resign about five months later, after another public row over a relationship of Yle journalism and CMM. Even the CEO of Yle, Lauri Kivinen, renounced his position prematurely in 2018. Sipilägate compelled Yle to create more clear internal rules and processes to improve integrity of journalistic work. Additional protection against external pressure was considered necessary, as something like this could potentially occur again. According to the new editor-in-chief of Yle News, it also seems to have taught Finnish politicians a lesson about how to not interfere in Yle journalism.
The Administrative Council are a colourful group and they try to influence the news production at times but the firewalls hold strong […] there was a long time of silence after Sipilägate, when it seemed nobody [of the politicians] had dared to comment [on their work] with a risk of feeling that they were leaning on the editor. Of course, while the editor-in-chief should be given feedback where necessary, it should be directed to him, not directly to the reporters. Nowadays the situation has normalised. (Yle editor-in-chief, 2020)
