Has the Dutch news media acted as a policy actor in the road pricing policy debate?

Increasing the acceptability of a congestion charging scheme

“…Studies analysing the relations between voting intentions and scheme acceptability (Hensher, 2013;Eliasson and Jonsson, 2011) have underlined the importance of providing the public with information about the potential impacts of the scheme and "marketing" appropriately the benefits of the changes (Cools et al, 2011). Regarding information, Ardiç et al (2013) emphasise the important role played by the news media as a nonobjective policy actor.…”

The reciprocal relationship between policy debate and media coverage: The case of road pricing policy in the Netherlands

“…The percentage scores were 89%, 81% and 78%, respectively; the Kappa agreement scores were 0.80, 0.64 and 0.59, respectively. These scores are considered satisfactory for exploratory research using multifaceted coding schemes (like this study) by Ardıç et al (2013) based on insights from Banerjee et al (1999), Landis and Koch (1977), Lombard et al (2002) and Rourke et al (2000) (see Ardıç et al (2013) for justification of the selected reliability procedure and detailed information about its application).…”

“…The sample includes 405 news articles. A latent content analysis was applied to this sample of news articles as part of a larger piece of research on the role of the media in the Dutch road pricing policy process, and was also partially used in the study by Ardıç et al (2013).…”

“…It is the tone presented to readers' (Ardıç et al, 2013, p. 50). For instance, as illustrated by Ardıç et al (2013), if an actor tone for a sub-issue is negative -for example, an actor thinks that the technical system of the KH proposal has privacy problems, and the media presents this position in a negative manner by implying that this argument is trivial and even wrong -then overall tone is positive. In other words, the message to the reader in this paragraph of news is that the KH proposal does not have any privacy problems.…”

“…In addition, the extent to which the content of a policy debate (media input) is reflected in the media coverage (media output) depends on the degree of media bias. The study by Ardıç et al (2013) showed that the five Dutch newspapers under investigation favour specific policy positions (e.g. are negative or positive towards the road pricing policy).…”