By Jason Hreha

Glossary

Hostile Media Effect

Reviewed by Jason Hreha

Published 3 min read

Two committed groups watch the same news report about a conflict. One group says the report favors its opponents. The other says exactly the same thing.

The disagreement may concern more than the facts in the report. Each group brings a different idea of what a fair account would say, which facts deserve emphasis, and how an undecided audience will react.

What is the hostile media effect?

The hostile media effect is the tendency for committed partisans to see the same news coverage as unfairly hostile to their own side. It is also called the hostile media bias or hostile media phenomenon.

The effect is not the general belief that journalists have political views. It is a difference in how people with strong and opposing commitments interpret common coverage. A neutral observer may see the report as mixed or unremarkable while each partisan sees evidence that the other side received better treatment.

The original hostile media study

Robert Vallone, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper introduced the term in a 1985 study of news coverage of the Beirut massacre. Pro-Israeli and pro-Arab participants watched the same samples of television reporting. Each side judged the coverage as biased against its position. They also differed in how they evaluated and recalled parts of the report.

The important detail is that the participants saw the same material. The study does not establish that the coverage was objectively neutral. It shows how opposing commitments can produce opposing judgments from a shared stimulus.

Why can the same report look hostile to both sides?

Partisans do not necessarily agree on what balance would look like. A sentence that one side sees as a necessary correction may strike the other as an accusation. A fact that seems central to one person may look like a distracting exception to someone else.

People may also disagree about the likely effect on an uncommitted audience. A partisan can understand the argument made by the other side and still worry that an uninformed viewer will accept it. The coverage then feels hostile because of what it might make other people believe.

A 2011 meta-analysis by Glenn Hansen and Hyunjung Kim found the hostile media effect across the studies it reviewed. Its abstract reports a moderate overall effect and a stronger effect among people who were more involved in the issue. That does not make the effect universal. It suggests that commitment to the dispute is part of the story.

Real media bias and the hostile media effect

News coverage can be inaccurate, selective, or slanted. Finding evidence of the hostile media effect does not clear a report of those problems. And identifying a factual error in an article is not evidence that the reader is biased.

The stronger test compares judgments of the same material. If opposing partisans find opposite forms of hostility in identical coverage, their prior commitments are helping shape the verdict. That still leaves open a separate question: what would a careful assessment of the report itself show?

This is why “both sides complained” is weak evidence of fairness. Both sides could be reacting through a hostile-media lens. The report could also contain serious problems. Audience reactions and content quality have to be examined separately.

Hostile media effect and hostile attribution bias

The names sound similar, but the concepts are different. The hostile media effect concerns partisan judgments of media coverage. Hostile attribution bias is the tendency to interpret another person’s ambiguous behavior as hostile. One is about a report’s treatment of a side; the other is about a person’s intention.

From “biased” to a claim you can check

“The report is biased” is a verdict. Turn it into a claim. Which sentence was false? Which relevant fact was omitted? Which source received more credibility, and by what standard? Would the same wording seem unfair if the group labels were reversed?

A global verdict ends the argument. A specific claim gives someone else something to inspect.

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