What bias? Understanding bias accusations towards Public Service Media in the Netherlands

Public Service Media (PSM) play a unique role in democratic societies by creating a shared public space (Schweizer & Puppis, 2018). The purpose of public media in society is generally depicted as being charged with a dual task: on the one hand presenting factual news and on the other hand offering a balanced representation of multiple perspectives on topical and societal issues (Bos et al., 2016; Schweizer & Puppis, 2018). However, there are challenges that hinder PSM from fulfilling these ideals and hence threaten their democratic function. In Europe, we see an increased politicization of mainstream media, particularly among populist radical right-wing parties and politicians (Egelhofer et al., 2021; Fawzi, 2019), but also amongst non-populist politicians (Solis & Sagarzazu, 2020). For example, bias accusations towards PSM and mainstream news outlets are prevalent, in both the US and Europe (Roberts & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020; Holtz-Bacha, 2021). Bias accusations relate to a broader question of erosion of trust in democratic institutions, and potentially have negative implications for media trust (Brosius et al., 2022; Egelhofer et al., 2021). The Netherlands is no exception, with heated debates on the alleged bias of the public service broadcaster NOS. Existing studies have tried to capture political biases in the news (see Hopmann et al., 2012; Van Hoof et al., 2014; Vliegenthart et al., 2010) as well as focus on anti-media rhetoric and populist discourse. Although we know bias accusations towards news outlets are forms of anti-media criticism (Egelhofer et al., 2021), we still know little systematically about 1) how bias accusations against public media are constructed in the online domain, 2) how widespread these bias accusations are, and 3), whether the biases in academic literature match the content of those bias accusations in public debates. This study therefore aims to map out the discourse on bias accusations towards PSM in the Netherlands and to ground the scientific literature on media bias into the actual debates. This paper takes a qualitative approach (Grounded Theory Light) and is guided by the following research question: how are bias accusations towards the NOS constructed in online discourse amongst politicians and opinion leaders? We focus on contemporary (2017-2022) bias accusations given the increased polarized tone of these bias debates (see Haller & Holt, 2019 on ‘die Lügenpresse’). Considering indicators of media bias, existing literature focuses on three news dimensions: coverage, agenda and statement bias (Brandenburg 2005; D’Alessio & Allen, 2000; Hopmann et al., 2012). This paper will study to what extent these indicators are actually reflected in bias accusations towards the NOS. Secondly, it looks beyond these established indicators and aims to grasp what other, related terms and accusations that refer to the partiality of the NOS are voiced. We gather data from online weblogs (i.e. GeenStijl, bnnvara.nl, DeDagelijksteStandaard, KarskensTimes.nl, etc.) and Twitter. For Tweets we use ‘advanced search settings’ to collect accusations by opinion leaders (selection based on profession within public domain). We moreover employ the ‘Parliamentary Twitter database’ to extract tweets by politicians. Everything is coded and analyzed using atlas.ti.