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Having a voice in media is important to gain power and legitimacy in policy processes. However, media are biased in transmitting information. Using a quantitative content analysis of ten years' news reporting around water management policies in the Netherlands, we study how much media attention different groups of actors receive and how media biases relate to this attention. Executive politicians get on the news because of their authoritative position; less authoritative actors getting on the news is more related to information biases. Information biases can thus function as a form of checks and balances in news reporting on policy processes.

In many policy processes nowadays a variety of actors is involved which results in complex decision making processes, since these different actors have various perspectives on the problem and the matching solutions. Such complex processes are difficult to grasp in short reports in newspapers or on television, especially since journalists have to deal with increasing time pressures and demands to make news items more entertaining. This leads to biases in the construction of the policy processes. In this study we examine whether the biases of fragmentization, dramatization, personalization, the authority-disorder bias and the negativity bias can be found in media reporting on complex decision making processes in the Netherlands. We conducted a quantitative content analysis on media reports on five complex water management projects in the Netherlands. We found that in these media reports stories are often fragmentized, dramatized and unfavourably towards the project, and frequently an authority is blamed for not taking appropriates measures. Certain actors take advantage of these biases more than other actors: media attention for oppositional politicians and interest groups in particular relate significantly to the media biases.