--- title: "Who Watches Yle? The Governance Question Behind the DEI Leaks" description: "Journalists Sanna Ukkola and Ivan Puopolo spent a year documenting diversity-training leaks at Finland's public broadcaster. The more interesting story, underneath the culture-war framing, is who is supposed to be holding a 600-million-euro institution accountable — and isn't." datePublished: 2026-08-07 dateModified: 2026-08-07 authors: ["Sami Miettinen"] tags: ["media","yle","governance","journalism","finland","sanna-ukkola","ivan-puopolo"] canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/notes/yle-dei-training-journalism-integrity/ --- # Who Watches Yle? The Governance Question Behind the DEI Leaks Yle's CEO, Merja Ylä-Anttila, told her own staff in an internal address that the broadcaster was the target of "information influencing" and, in places, an "information war." I sat down with journalists Sanna Ukkola and Ivan Puopolo to ask a fairly direct question: is Finland's public broadcaster under attack, or is it responding to accurate reporting about itself ([Neuvottelija](/podcast/episodes/441-yle-hyokkaa-sanna-ukkola-ivan-puopolo-neuvottelija-268/))? Worth saying up front: the transcript has no speaker labels, so where I can't confidently tell which of the two guests is talking, I've attributed claims to "my guests" jointly rather than guess. And this episode runs on claims from two named journalists and leaked internal documents, set against a broadcaster that has repeatedly and publicly disputed the characterization. My guests say Yle's own explanations shifted as reporting progressed — first that diversity trainings weren't mandatory, then that they were but didn't touch journalistic content, then that they did but it didn't matter ([04:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=249s)). That pattern, real or not, is itself part of what made this a story rather than a one-week news cycle. The specific claims are pointed. Ukkola — the discovery traces back to her own Iltalehti reporting — says she saw internal DEI training material touching on how a subject's ethnicity, gender and disability status should factor into coverage and casting decisions, and that spreadsheets tracking interviewees' demographic data have been kept since around 2020 ([23:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=1412s)). One training example described in the conversation: journalists were reportedly told to avoid "hero stories" about disabled people accomplishing everyday tasks, because some disabled people dislike that framing ([24:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=1475s)) — met with the objection that "you should never think about how the audience will react. That shouldn't factor into the judgment at all" ([25:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=1539s)). Yle's own board chair, Matti Apunen, is cited in the conversation as flagging a related data point himself: about 40% of journalists with under ten years' experience say they believe journalism's purpose is to "change the world and make it better" ([26:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=1605s)) — mission-driven rather than journalistic, in Apunen's own words as relayed on the show. The whistleblower angle is where the episode gets uncomfortable. A subcontracted Yle journalist, credited in the show notes as Lloyd Libison, appeared on Puopolo's own program and said some trainings were mandatory — a fact Yle had denied. He was suspended from his show and publicly criticized by his supervisor ([11:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=711s)), and became the subject of unflattering personal coverage, including a Helsingin Sanomat review that was "absolutely crushing" and, my guests say, contained factual errors ([12:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=773s)), rather than the substance of what he'd said. One of my guests says they have "dozens of sources from inside Yle" who won't go on record because they've watched what happened to him ([13:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=842s)). But the part of this conversation that will outlast the DEI news cycle is the governance structure underneath it. Yle is organized as a limited company that runs entirely on public money — nearly €600 million a year ([02:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=125s)) — which under Finland's Limited Liability Companies Act means it isn't required to disclose its finances with the same granularity as, say, the police ([04:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=249s)). Its nominal oversight body, the governing council, is stocked with politicians and pays its own members roughly €12,000 a year plus expenses ([17:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=1035s)). The concrete example from the conversation: the council's chairman took a taxpayer-funded 25th-wedding-anniversary trip to Paris and, on returning, gave a public statement about the DEI controversy that was — as my guests put it — "practically speaking, word for word" identical to a statement Yle's own editors-in-chief had issued a month and a half earlier ([33:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=1988s)). The body meant to check management was repeating management's talking points. Add to that the funding question sitting alongside it: Yle's roughly €200 million journalism budget produces on the order of 130–140 STT-cited "scoops" a year — about €1.2–1.3 million each, against a fraction of that at commercial outlets like Helsingin Sanomat, by my guests' own math ([22:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=1352s)). And there's an EU competition-law complaint already filed by a commercial rival, Sanoma, arguing the funding model itself breaches EU rules against state-subsidized commercial activity ([19:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8&t=1161s)). **Where I land.** Strip out the DEI framing and you're left with a more boring, more durable problem: a public institution with a nine-figure annual budget, a self-referential oversight body, and a disclosure regime built for private companies rather than public trusts. That combination produces exactly the failure mode this episode documents, regardless of which political direction the specific complaint points in next time. Ukkola and Puopolo are two named journalists making a case Yle disputes — read it that way, and judge the governing-council anecdote on its own; it doesn't need the culture-war framing to be a real accountability problem.
[Watch the full episode on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAg9XpB-e8) · [read the full transcript](/podcast/episodes/441-yle-hyokkaa-sanna-ukkola-ivan-puopolo-neuvottelija-268/).