Media & verantwoording over incidenten: gevolgen voor publieke organisaties

Abstract

The consequences of media attention for politics have been heavily debated, but little was known about its effects on actors close to, but outside the direct political domain: public organizations. Previous research in the field of media & politics as well as in public accountability studies suggests two possible categories of effects. The first one is that intensive media coverage can, eventually via public accountability processes, lead to extreme caution at the side of the account-giver, thus the public organization, out of fear to be punished again in case of failure. The second category of possible consequences is that heavy media attention – directly or through formal accountability processes – leads to corrective effects on the organization: the organization improves its functioning as a consequence of accountability and media attention. This qualitative research deals with the question of ‘who is right?’: do mediatized incidents concerning public organizations, either directly or through formal processes of accountability, lead to goal displacement or goal attainment? This research draws upon insights from public administration and organizational theory to explore the consequences of mediatized incidents for public sector organizations in the Netherlands. First, media presence public sector organizations has been analyzed in terms of quantity. This research shows that – for 802 articles in a two-week period – public organizations are often mentioned in newspaper articles (40 per cent of all articles), but are less often the main actor in these messages (13 per cent of all articles) and in only 1 per cent journalists have acted as an independent forum. Regarding all mentions, the amount of media coverage is comparable to that for political actors.Subsequently, it has been investigated if critical media reports on public sector organizations lead to formal public accountability (parliamentary questions). It can be concluded that critical reports hardly ever lead to formal political accountability in the form of questions by MP’s. To be sure, a large share of the questions (119 out of 164) is based on media news (tv, internet, newspaper), but they do not deal with public organizations. The second and largest part of the research consists of case studies. Did media attention, eventually via accountability processes, have consequences for their internal and external accountability relations, as well as for their incident-related and external communication policies? My cases are organizations with a public task that faced incidents which received media coverage. I investigated housing corporation Mitros with boiler problems, the (former) Food and Consumer Safety Authority (VWA) and livestock transport, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) with the HPV vaccination campaign and ProRail with wintry weather that caused railway disruptions. The main conclusions of these case studies are that mediatized accountability activates and intensifies external account giving, often with explicit reference to media coverage. With some exceptions, it seems that the activation of formal account giving through mediatized accountability leads to more frequent interaction, but this quickly subsides once political attention shifts to other issues. Adaptation can also be found in communication and incident-related policies. This dissertation shows that goal displacement is relatively rare. Way more often, I find goal attainment and goal adjustment. Public organizations facing an incident therefore seem to adapt to a changing environment, they mediatise, and in doing so move in a more functional direction, but sometimes less functional, too.