The research results show that the arguments used by the tobacco industry under the Policy Dystopia Model to legalize novel products have been adapted to the specific context in Vietnam. Among the 10 main arguments, the industry only focuses on arguments related to harm reduction (Novel products are less harmful), illicit trade (Novel products will cause smuggling if not legislated) and the positive characteristics (Novel products are cleaner).
To determine the news articles classification criteria, our experts performed independent content analysis, then cross-checked the results between experts. The rule of thumb is that if a sign appears with its content (There should be a policy to manage novel products; Pilot management for heated tobacco/ e-cigarettes/ novel products in Vietnam; Smuggling, counterfeit goods, illicit trade), this news article will be classified as “Support Tobacco Industry”. On the opposite side, a news article will be classified as “Support Public Health”. For “Not yet classify” groups, our experts have decided if it mentions about the harm of novel products for the public, individual health; the status of novel products used in the youth; etc. and doesn’t have any policy recommendations for the government, ministries, and stakeholders.
Once the data crawling process has completed, 2 coders/experts independently categorized the relevant news into three groups: support the tobacco industry, support public health and unknown news. After that, the major analysis was done for the news of the first group. TC experts use the codebook to code retrieval public news that supports for the tobacco industry.
The computer-aided qualitative analysis tool is built to let the expert coders have to follow strictly an analysis process that includes consequent phases.
Based on the self-built system, we searched and collected tobacco-and-tax-related articles/news/posts from the pre-identified list of websites. This list of more than 1000 online news sites includes more than 200 news sites that belong to press agencies licensed by the Ministry of Information and Communications and usual news sites of organizations or individuals. The collected news is those published in the time range from August 2017 (after the Ministry of Finance published a proposal on excise tax revision) to August 2022 and in Vietnamese to suit the Vietnamese context and the purpose of this study. They are crawled based on a set of keywords related to tobacco tax topics. This set of keywords has been predefined by experts through a pilot process and evaluated the quality according to the given requirements. After the data is collected, a filtering process will be performed to remove articles/news with duplicate content, or articles that do not match the topic requirement before they are included in the analysis.
From the coded data, there were 22 instrumental industry tactics identified in the media. Not all the listed instruments were found in the media monitoring. This is normal as using the public media only cannot reveal all the interference actions which are often done through non-public channels.
Out of the five main instrument categories, the “Information management” is mostly used with (244 times in 213 news articles). The next popular instrument is “Illicit trade” with approximately 56% (119 times in 213 news articles). The coalition management is the third most used tactic with 36% (76 times in 213 news articles). This is often the case when the industry mobilizes support. Other studies have found that with novel products, there is an increase in the number and variety of front groups created, in the form of consumers or consumer protection groups.