Belgium’s complex political and linguistic division into two, three, or even four different entities, depending on one’s definition, actually ensures that Belgium as a country has a very diverse media landscape, with legacy outlets and public broadcasters in Dutch, French, a mixture of both languages, as well as German. Notwithstanding, the 2017 Media Pluralism Monitor marked Belgium as a “high risk” country regarding (horizontal) media ownership concentration, and a “medium risk” country when it comes to cross-media concentration of ownership and competition enforcement. It is noteworthy that the researchers themselves admitted to having considered the Dutch- and French-speaking media markets as separate entities and did not focus on Belgium as a whole, “which often resulted in high risk assessments due to their limited size” (Valcke et al., 2018: 7).
Partly government-funded public broadcasters operate in three Belgian communities (linguistically divided between a Dutch-, French-, and German-speaking community) and are (among) the key players in their respective small media markets. Most notably in Flanders, public broadcaster VRT is the most dominant in terms of radio and television market share as well as television news ratings, though it lags behind considerably in online news. In Wallonia, private broadcaster RTL consistently beats public broadcaster RTBF in both overall market shares and television news ratings. Even though the German-speaking Belgians are a tiny minority of just 70,000 people, its dedicated public broadcaster BRF boasts one television channel and three radio channels, with much content delivered by RTBF.
Private media tend to be active solely in their own media market, with little overlap between the Flemish and Walloon sides. Publishing and broadcasting company Roularta, along with its 50 per cent stake in sister company Mediafin, is the only “Belgian” media company, with newspapers (De Tijd and L’Echo), magazines (Knack and Le Vif), news websites, and business television news channels (Kanaal Z and Canal Z) in both main Belgian languages. Flemish media company DPG Media also owns the Walloon news website 7sur7, but it is mostly active in other countries, as is its direct rival company Mediahuis. The latter is active in the Netherlands and Ireland. DPG Media holds assets in the Netherlands and Denmark – in fact, Mediahuis and DPG Media are the leading newspaper groups in the Netherlands.
Telecommunications companies are still more “national”, with two main players: Telenet (part of LGI, active in many European nations) and the telecommunications incumbent Proximus, active across the nation.
