According to a nationwide 2018 study among 1,302 professional journalists – of which 681 were Flemish – Belgian journalists reported general satisfaction with their degree of editorial independence from commercial and marketing pressure. It is noteworthy, though, that a mere 16.9 per cent of Flemish journalists indicated being “very satisfied”, and the overall satisfaction rate landed at a rather small majority of 56 per cent. According to the researchers, older journalists tend to be less satisfied than their younger peers (Van Leuven et al., 2019).
Our interviewees were more critical of the sometimes-ambivalent relationships between journalism and marketing. In the case of one newspaper, the marketing team had been effectively placed inside the newsroom itself, amongst the journalists. The underlying idea was that cooperations could be fostered in such a way that the marketeers who are supposed to “sell” the journalists’ output could get to know them better, and involve journalists more in the process. The interviewed journalists were hesitant to make pronounced statements in favour of or against this system but expressed a mild degree of unease with the change in the newsroom structure, which was not negotiated or explicitly discussed beforehand.
Furthermore, the line between actual journalistic content and branded content appears to be blurring as well: journalists did not report being forced to write branded content, but noted that there were tendencies to harmonize the news and branded content, done purposely to make it less clear for the average media consumer what news is branded and what is not. That is problematic, as consumers should be made aware what content is editorially arranged and what is influenced by a commercial agenda. The Jury for Ethical Practices in Advertising has guidelines concerning branded content, but the vague description of what is understood as “recognisable as advertising” leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
The Flemish public broadcaster has its editorial independence enshrined in the management contracts with the Flemish government, which are renegotiated and signed every five years. Private news companies in Flanders must fulfil fewer specific requirements regarding editorial independence, but are still bound by the Flemish Journalism Code. In many instances, there are off-the-record examples indicating that newsroom integrity is jeopardised. In recent research by Jonathan Hendrickx, an investigation into self-promotion of news brands of the same media company revealed that the newly-founded media company DPG Media was indeed boosting its own media, programmes, and celebrities across different news brands (Goyvaerts et al., 2020).
