Belgium

Highly determined by the country’s unique political, cultural, and bilingual constellation, the media system in Belgium is divided into two main media cultures, operating at different paces: the Dutch-speaking Flanders and the French-speaking Wallonia. While unitary Belgian media organizations in the fields of broadcasting and telecommunications were common for the larger part of the 20th century, the regionalization of media is an inherent characteristic of Belgian media and became institutionalized in the 1970s and 1980s.

Today, the Belgian media environment is known as a liberalized, highly competitive, and concentrated market with limited foreign ownership and a constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press. Communication infrastructures are dense and, except for radio, digitalized, which has opened the door for widespread convergence and has established the telecommunications distributors as ...