Every news medium is legally obliged to publish regularly the list of its main shareholders, but this is not always a guarantee of full transparency, either because of crossownership situations or because of financial investors who are difficult to identify. Nowadays, however, as the main news media of the country are concentrated in the hands of four or five well-known groups, the question of ownership is not really a disputed issue. And most of the Internet sites of those news media usually provide some information about all the other media belonging to the same group.
A new step in this field was very recently (2010) made by the Regulatory Entity for the Media (ERC), through the creation, on its site, of a “Database for the Transparency of Media Ownership”, where information is available for most of the media companies in the country. The database provides information not only on the main shareholders of each company, but also on the other companies that are part of them.
