Hostile Media Effect

For journalists reporting on controversial political issues, it is all too common to get critical feedback from readers or viewers who accuse them of bias. They find some comfort, however, when audience members from both sides of a political fence charge that news coverage is slanted in favor of the other side. This scenario is a classic illustration of the hostile media effect—the tendency for opposing partisans to see presumably neutral news coverage as unfairly biased against their own point of view.

Psychologists regard such biased perceptions as a contrast effect, in which partisans perceive information to be further away from their own position on an issue. In this sense the hostile media effect illustrates the subjective character of information processing. The fact that different people can perceive or interpret the same political information in different ways nicely illustrates the “active audience” paradigm and argues against the view of the media audience as a passive, vulnerable, and homogenous mass.

An important point is that, for any political issue, not everyone exhibits the hostile media perception. This perceptual bias is often dramatically evident for partisans, those individuals who are highly involved in or have strong opinions on an issue, but it is just as dramatically lacking for people who are neutral or uninterested. Thus it begs another important question in the political communication arena: Just who is a partisan? Research has successfully demonstrated the hostile media effect for people who identify strongly with an interest group or who hold intense or extreme [Page 312]attitudes on an issue. But many questions remain about the nature of issue involvement and how it might generate perceptions of unfavorable media bias.

Although this phenomenon has long been familiar to news reporters and editors, researchers turned serious empirical attention to the idea only in 1985, when Vallone, Ross, and Lepper published the first carefully observed evidence. The authors showed that groups of Arab and Israeli students each considered broadcast news coverage of conflict in the Middle East to be biased against their own position. As this example illustrates, the hostile media effect is most typically studied by recruiting groups of partisans with opposing views toward a political controversy and exposing them to samples of media coverage of the issue, coverage often selected or sometimes even manipulated to be as neutral or “balanced” as possible. The resulting perceptions of bias have been demonstrated across a range of issues, including debates about genetically modified foods, the 1997 United Parcel Service strike, physician-assisted suicide, sports rivalries, the use of primates in laboratory research, legalized gambling, and, of course, political elections. Some field survey studies have also shown a negative relationship between respondents' political attitudes and their perceptions of the slant of mass media coverage.

However, research has also only begun to carefully investigate some intriguing theoretical questions, including whether this bias is unique to information in a mass media context. Several studies have addressed this question by presenting partisans with content randomly presented as either a mass media report or a college student's essay for a composition class. Results show that partisans view media contents as unfairly biased, but see the identical information as neutral or even supportive when it appears in the student essay context. These findings suggest that the same content can produce a contrast effect when it appears in the mass media, but an assimilation effect (in which partisans see information as more similar to, rather than different from, their own position) in non-media formats, perhaps because the mass media arouses a defensive processing response.

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