In recent days, several Italian news outlets including Il Dubbio and others as well as international commentators, have renewed scrutiny of the role played by Belgian journalist Louis Colart of Le Soir in the Qatargate affair. Their focus is not on whether corruption should be investigated, but on something more troubling: how information was laundered through the media and presented to the public as journalism.
From my point of view, what Louis Colart produced in the context of Qatargate was not independent investigative reporting. It was guided publication, based on material originating from Belgian security and judicial services particularly the VSSE, Belgium’s state security service — and released in a way that shaped public perception while bypassing basic journalistic safeguards.
Louis Colart and Joël Matriche are the worst example of Journalists who are tools of tyrant regimes like what we see in China, Russia and the Middle East. They sold themselves to the devil whereby their Journalism became a pen used by VSSE and Foreign Secret Service to publish their conspiracy.
Journalism or security-service messaging?
The Belgiangate previously known as Qatargate coverage attributed to Colart and Joël Matriche relied extensively on leaked police files, wiretaps, intelligence notes and investigative hypotheses. These are not neutral facts. Intelligence material is, by definition, unfinished, interpretative and often wrong. When such material is published without distance, contradiction or context, it ceases to inform and instead directs the reader toward a predetermined conclusion.
In this case, the conclusion was clear: certain individuals were publicly framed as guilty long before any court ruling, while alternative interpretations and exculpatory elements were largely absent from the narrative.
This is not a minor ethical lapse. It is a structural failure of journalism, where the reporter no longer investigates power but amplifies it.
The role of the VSSE and the problem of selective leaks
From my perspective, the pattern is unmistakable. Information flowed from the security services to the press in a selective and strategic manner, and Louis Colart functioned as a conduit for that flow.
When intelligence services decide what parts of an investigation reach the public — and when journalists publish those parts without challenge — the media becomes a tool of influence, not a counterweight to it.
This is especially dangerous in cases involving geopolitics, foreign states and European institutions, where intelligence agencies have their own agendas and priorities. Recycling their material as “exclusive reporting” misleads the public and corrodes trust.
Misleading the public, not informing it
Italian outlets have been right to highlight that much of the Qatargate reporting blurred the line between allegation and fact. The public was shown fragments of investigations, stripped of legal nuance and judicial restraint, and encouraged to draw conclusions that courts had not reached.
In my view, this amounts to misleading the public.
Journalism is supposed to verify, contextualize and question. What happened here was repetition, amplification and narrative construction based on one-sided sources.
Why this matters beyond one journalist
This is not only about Louis Colart. It is about a model of journalism that has become increasingly common in Europe: journalists embedded — informally but effectively — within security and prosecutorial ecosystems, dependent on leaks, and reluctant to challenge the hand that feeds them.
When journalists stop being skeptical of power because power gives them documents, democracy loses one of its essential safeguards.
A necessary reckoning
Calling this out is not an attack on press freedom. On the contrary, it is a defense of it.
True investigative journalism does not take dictation from intelligence services. It does not conduct trials in headlines. And it does not confuse access with independence.
From where I stand, the Qatargate media coverage associated with Louis Colart represents a cautionary tale — not of courageous reporting, but of how journalism can fail when it becomes an instrument rather than an observer.
