Study of Partisan News Readers Reveals Hostile Media Perceptions of Balanced Stories

Abstract

United States audience evaluations of reporter and news-outlet credibility have generally been less than favorable during the past few decades.1 The mass in general-and newspapers in particular-are suffering from a credibility crisis as the public has become cynical about the accuracy or even truthfulness of what is being reported.2 Furthermore, some conservative watchdog groups claim that the have a pro-liberal slant. Such distrust may have dire consequences because news credibility influences people's reaction to news and may affect newspaper readership and even trust in government.3This paper focuses on the role that partisanship plays in the judging of news credibility. The objective was to shed light on the question of who influences the evaluation of news credibility: the press (i.e., news story structure) or the individual reader (i.e., partisanship), especially in the case of controversial partisan issues.In their investigation of voters' perceptions of bias in newspaper coverage of the 1992 election,4 Dalton, Beck and Huckfeldt found a lack of correspondence between respondents' perceptions of which presidential candidate newspapers favored and the actual slant of their newspapers' coverage. Niven also found little evidence of partisan bias.5 Entman suggests that the liberal bias charge against the is largely unfounded,6 although some scholars argue that the American press has been more liberal or conservative, reflecting the climate of the country at certain times.7That finding leads one to speculate that audiences' personal characteristics (particularly partisanship) may be much more important than news in shaping perceptions of news bias.8 Indeed, group membership or partisanship has been found to play a role in the perception of bias regarding partisan issues such as the Middle East conflict.9 This tendency for partisans to see news coverage as biased against their own side is consistent with the more general phenomenon, which suggests people on opposing sides of an issue often judge the same news story as biased against their own views.10The media perception may help to explain why the press receives widespread criticism as being pro-left or pro-right, especially if partisans happen to see even a balanced press as leaning in favor of their opponent. In the diverse and plentiful research devoted to news credibility,11 however, little attention has been given to the relationship between partisanship, bias perception and news credibility judgment.12 This is the void this research has tried to fill.The Present StudyThe study used an experimental design, varying newspaper-story structure and measuring readers' partisanship, hostile perception (hereafter HMP) and news credibility. The basic assumption was that partisanship functions as an antecedent of the HMP and the evaluation of news credibility.Hypotheses and Research QuestionsThe first hypothesis is consistent with the traditional conceptualization of the hostile perception:H1a:Pro-choice partisans will perceive a balanced newspaper story as more biased against the pro-choice position than will pro-life partisans.H1b:Pro-life partisans will perceive the balanced newspaper story as more biased against the pro-life position than will pro-choice partisans.In addition, the study explored whether (and to what extent) the HMP exists in the evaluation of an (i.e. one-sided) news story. The following research question was posed:RQ1:What is a partisan's hostile perception of an imbalanced news story?Next, the study examined the role of partisanship in evaluating news credibility. If partisans evaluate a news story's credibility as low despite its balanced structure, we could conclude that news credibility judgment is not a function of the news story alone. Conversely, if partisans evaluate the news credibility of the news story based on the content of the story alone (regardless of HMP, if any), it could be said that the story is the main factor in determining news credibility. …