I don’t think for legal purposes - not specifically, anyway. All newspapers I read (Dutch ones) have opinion pieces which explicitly do reflect the opinion of the newspaper (written by the editors and generally known as a ‘commentary’). All other opinion pieces published by the newspaper are the opinion of the individual columnists, not of the newspaper (even though they published it and it may align with their opinion anyway).
I would assume that it’s boilerplate for all contributed articles.
Especially articles categorized as opinion pieces.
It probably is, for legal purposes.
I don’t think for legal purposes - not specifically, anyway. All newspapers I read (Dutch ones) have opinion pieces which explicitly do reflect the opinion of the newspaper (written by the editors and generally known as a ‘commentary’). All other opinion pieces published by the newspaper are the opinion of the individual columnists, not of the newspaper (even though they published it and it may align with their opinion anyway).
It’s just transparant, pretty much.