On November 12, the Finnish Ministry of Communications, announced that it was planning to abolished the so-called selective press subsidy, so that support would be available to political parties' publications only from 1999 onwards. Sanoma also plans to launch a new paper to rival Aamulehti's business daily, Kauppalehti. The Aamulehti group is merging with MTV in 1998 to form the multi-media group. The Swedish media group, Marieberg, owns 29 per cent of the shares in Aamulehti. A major privacy debate was sparked in January, after the press published the photograph of a black American, Steven Thomas, along with police reports that.
Finnish law allows the authorities to expose private details of they consider it justified.
Police Chief Inspector Terho Maki said that he had decided to release first Thomas's name, then his skin colour, and finally his picture, weighing the right to privacy against the need to find all the victims - to solve the case and prevent more disease. The problem in publishing the picture in Finland is that it might label a whole group of foreigners or black people as suspicious, said a spokesman for the Culture Minister, Claes Andersson. Finland has a very low rate of HIV infection - only abut 600 out of a population of just over five million. Relative to larger countries, it also a tiny black population.