The Causes of Hostile Media Judgments

This research investigated the mechanisms involved in the hostile media effect, in which partisans tend to judge news coverage as biased against their own side. Subjects on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the abortion issue were shown television news coverage of both issues. They were then tested for memory of program content and judgments of bias and imbalance in coverage. Mideast partisans judged coverage to be biased against their own side, replicating previous findings; abortion partisans showed a much less consistent pattern of hostile media judgments. Prior beliefs about media bias, together with issue attitudes, were found to account for hostile media judgments. Subjects also tended to selectively categorize specific items in a direction favorable to their attitude, a process tending to inhibit hostile media judgments.