(Mis)perception of bias in print media: How depth of content evaluation affects the perception of hostile bias in an objective news report.

Yana Litovsky,Nicholas D Duran

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0251355

Yana Litovsky, Nicholas D Duran

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251355

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Abstract

The hostile media effect describes the tendency for partisans to evaluate media content as relatively biased against their positions. The present study investigates what specific contextual elements of a news report contribute to this effect and how it may be mitigated by the depth of content evaluation. A online study of 102 participants revealed that less bias is perceived in a newspaper article when evaluating specific aspects of the article with the text available for reference than when evaluating the overall bias without referring to the text. Moreover, being asked to consider overall article bias increased subsequent ratings of bias in the discrete elements of the text. These results suggest that the perception of media bias may be counteracted by encouraging deep, evidence-based considerations of where the alleged bias might lie, but only if this happens before the reader has the chance to form an opinion based on a cursory assessment.

Highlights

Many of the social, cultural and political issues which impact our lives and shape our perception of society are defined for us by the media coverage they receive
One particular outlier was image bias; 59% of the those who said the photograph was “not well chosen/descriptive/objective” did not attribute this flaw to bias. This may be due to the fact that these participants felt there were other reasons that the photograph was poorly chosen which had nothing to do with any possible partisan slant
How depth of content evaluation affects the perception of bias in the news categorization.) On the other hand, people were more willing to signal potential partisanship when asked to indicate how much the Israelis or Palestinians were to blame for the current conflict

Summary

Introduction

Many of the social, cultural and political issues which impact our lives and shape our perception of society are defined for us by the media coverage they receive. Where anecdotal experience is scant and personal expertise missing, the information derived from newspapers, magazines and television news programs may constitute our main source of insight into a given issue and—as mediated by the effect of prior attitudes and persuasive advertising— become incorporated into our unique perspective on the facts. While media provide the building blocks of this attitude formation, our perception of reality is by no means a direct function of the news we are exposed to. We don’t always believe what we read or see. Whether it is a mistrust of the newsmakers’ accuracy or agenda, accusations of media bias are rampant. A 2005 poll showed that only 50% of Americans trusted the media to report news truthfully and fairly, compared to 70% in 1972 [1], and the public perception of the media as having a liberal bias in particular has been widely

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