Flemish journalists are highly educated, with 93 per cent acquiring a degree of higher education and nearly 65 per cent possessing a university degree. It is important to point out that especially younger journalists enjoyed higher education. There is also a significant difference concerning gender: three-quarters of female journalists have a university degree, compared with 59 per cent of male journalists (Van Leuven et al., 2019).
Professional integrity is one of their most important ethics, according to Flemish journalists. They consider it to be completely impermissible to receive money from a source or pay for information. Their opinion on how to get information tends to be more nuanced though. Acquiring information by using confidential files without permission or concealing that they are journalists was reported as less problematic. According to the nationwide 2008 survey, it is notable that privacy and ethics are less valued than they were ten years ago.
A possible explanation could be increasing financial pressure. Financial resources for journalists are progressively declining – especially Flemish investigative journalism has seen a substantial cut in resources. Three-quarters of Flemish journalists declare there is no time or budget to do profound research. According to them, this leads to a further “sensationalisation” of news and a shift to soft news. In the selection of topics, the potential click-rate is privileged more often than not.
In addition, a majority of Flemish journalists state an incremental increase of workload (82%) and broadening of tasks (87%) in recent years. Journalists are expected to work more across media platforms and to be more technologically skilled. As an example, at VRT, about 80 per cent of journalists work for at least two media (combinations of radio, television, and online), and more than 60 per cent even work for all three. Job satisfaction, on the whole, also appears to be declining.
