Hostile media effect

The hostile media effect is the tendency for individuals with strong opinions on opposite sides of a controversial issue to both perceive identical news coverage as unfairly biased against their own position. The phenomenon was proposed and experimentally studied in 1985 by Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper.

Studies

In 1982, the second major study of this phenomenon was undertaken when immigration in the U.S. and in U.S. presidential elections, as well as in other areas, such as media coverage of the South Korean National Security Act, the 1997 United Parcel Service Teamsters strike, genetically modified food, and sports.

The effect was originally dubbed "hostile media phenomenon" by Vallone et al., In other words, the intention of the reporter or the story is irrelevant – those "partisans" Princeton and Dartmouth students were shown a filmstrip of a controversial Princeton-Dartmouth football game. Asked to count the number of infractions committed by both sides, students at both universities "saw" many more infractions committed by the opposing side, in addition to making different generalizations about the game. Hastorf and Cantril concluded that "there is no such 'thing' as a 'game' existing 'out there' in its own right which people merely 'observe.' ... For the 'thing' simply is not the same for different people whether the 'thing' is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach."

Explanations

Cognitive

Three cognitive mechanisms for explaining the hostile media effect have been suggested:

Selective recall refers to memory and retrieval. In instances of the hostile media effect, partisans should tend to remember more of the disconfirming portions of a message than the parts that support their position, in a variation of the negativity effect. Vallone and his colleagues observed selective recall differing along partisan lines even on simple, objective criteria such as the number of references to a given subject. In numerous studies, Albert C. Gunther and his associates have suggested that the ability of mass media to reach a large audience is what triggers the hostile media effect. Consistently, they found that a message appearing to originate from a newspaper was perceived as hostile by partisans, while an identical message appearing in a student essay was perceived as unbiased, or even favorable toward the partisan cause.

The phenomenon also exists for personalities on television – partisans in a study were found to perceive significantly less bias in a host they perceive as like-minded. <blockquote>Consistent with a hostile media effect, issue partisans perceived less bias in opinionated news hosts whose viewpoints cohered with their own than did non-partisans and especially partisans on the opposing side of the issue. In most cases, these partisan differences were as big as—if not bigger than—the differences seen in response to non-opinionated news, indicating that even blatant deviations from journalistic norms do not quell partisan selectivity in news perceptions, at least when it comes to perceived bias in the host of opinionated programs.</blockquote> While partisans can agree on the bias of a particular source, the reasons for that bias appears to account for the difference; that is, consumers on both sides of an issue may see bias in a particular story, but are more likely to attribute that story to a host they perceive as hostile to their own particular cause.

Partisanship

All of these explanatory mechanisms are influenced by partisanship. From the first studies, the hostile media effect has required an audience of partisans, with stronger beliefs correlating with stronger manifestations of the effect. Gunther et al. said, "the relative hostile media effect occurs when individuals with different attitudes toward the issue exhibit significantly different evaluations of the same media content.”

In fact, as Glass et al. noted in a 2000 study, "partisans tend to see objectively biased articles as 'even-handed' if the bias impugns the opposition group." The study measured the responses of voters who support and oppose abortion rights, finding that "people with more extreme views on abortion sometimes evaluate biased news articles as being fair, but only when the opposing side is being gored."

The effect appears to exist more among conservatives than liberals, according to multiple studies. When randomly assigned either a clip from Comedy Central's The Daily Show (liberal), or a similar program from Fox News (conservative), conservatives perceived significantly more bias in the program than liberal subjects. attempted to discern why in some cases research subjects faulted ambiguous, contradictory information, and supported it in other cases. One conclusion they suggested was the reach of the publication – that is, the hostile media effect is likely to emerge when participants are estimating the effects on others of mass media with a large reach, but biased assimilation would occur when the participants are judging media with lower reach (in this case, a research report that presumably reaches only people in a particular field).

Involvement

Hansen and Kim found that involvement is positively correlated with hostile media effect; that is, the effect increases as individuals become more involved with the issue. The study also found a significant effect that emerged with those who have low involvement. Other studies have found high correlations of the effect in value-relevant involvement and in affective involvement.

Social identity theory suggests that media coverage of an ego-involving issue will activate group identity and increase the salience of the issue among members of a group that champions a particular political or social cause. This in turn triggers self-categorization processes, as ingroup members differentiate themselves from their counterparts in the outgroup, seeking to elevate their self-esteem by viewing the ingroup as superior to the disliked outgroup on core dimensions. When exposed to controversial media coverage that contains unfavorable depictions of the ingroup, group members, concerned about the perceived inaccuracy of the portrayals and convinced that the portrayals undermine the group's legitimacy in the larger society, cope by derogating media coverage, viewing it as hostilely biased. In this way, they reduce the symbolic threat and restore valued social self-esteem.

A related potential moderator is the outgroup membership of the message source. Reid found that more politically extreme Democratic students perceived less bias when a polemical assault on their group was attributed to a Democratic (ingroup) organization, but detected more bias when the attack was ascribed to a pro-Republican outgroup.

Mediators

Perloff contributing to hostile perceptions with Facebook news messages.

Consequences

Persuasive press inference

Gunther and Chia

It is not clear if the hostile media effect translates into real-world effects. Some research has explored the ways in which individuals take action to "'correct' perceived 'wrongs'" created by a perceived hostile media depiction of the individuals' group. This research has suggested that these individuals effectively feel disenfranchised, and may react by "defying the dominant public opinion climate, even engaging in undemocratic actions, and other times adopting a more passive approach, withdrawing from functional political or social activities." has revealed that the hostile media perception can be applied to a fake news context. Partisans from opposing sides were found to perceive the exact same news message to be fake to significantly varying degrees.

Possible remedies

Media literacy

Studies to determine whether media literacy – competency in analyzing and evaluating messages from mass media – might affect a media consumer's hostile media effect have limited results. In a 2014 study, participants watched a Media Literacy PSA prior to watching manipulated television programs, then asked to rate their perceptions of the relative hostility of the media afterwards. The effects were strong in some areas but less so in others. "Given that the digital media environment allows individuals to select their own media content – and people tend to choose what they find more credible – in some cases a news media literacy message may spur further selection into agreeable political enclaves, now seen as even more credible, and contribute to rising political polarization" (26). Besides media literacy messages, empathy was introduced to news messages to see whether the emotion can reduce HME. However, when the content was presented in the essay condition, participants generally judged the persuasiveness of the arguments as almost uniformly favorable to their own point of view, a result consistent with biased assimilation.