Hostile Media Effect

The hostile media effect is the tendency for people who hold strong opinions on opposite sides of a controversial issue to each perceive the identical news coverage as unfairly biased against their own position. The effect is considered largely responsible for declining trust in the news media, since it demonstrates that a great deal of perceived news bias actually originates in the audience's own bias rather than in the coverage itself, and studies have found that the more knowledgeable a person is about a given topic, the stronger their own hostile media effect tends to be. First studied in the early 1980s by the psychologists Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper, the hostile media effect has since become a foundational concept in the study of political communication and media communications.