When pro-Israeli and pro-Arab study participants were shown media coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre, each group equally perceived the coverage as biased against their own side.
Additionally, the participants that believed that they were more knowledgeable on the subject felt more strongly that the coverage was biased.


Hostile media phenomenon experiment

A phenomenon in which individuals with opposing viewpoints both perceive the same news media as being biased against their position.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Pepperdine University

Although humans ordinarily prioritize self-enhancing information, individuals also often perceive news media as largely opposing their personal beliefs.

Biases in media perception

Axt, J. R., Landau, M. J., & Kay, A. C. (2020). Fake news attributions as a source of nonspecific structure. In R. Greifeneder, M. Jaffé, E. J. Newman, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), The psychology of fake news: Accepting, sharing, and correcting misinformation (pp. 220–234). London: Routledge. 

Fake news attributions as a source of nonspecific structure

The hostile media phenomenon

Conservatives have been found to indicate more distrust of the media than liberals.

Asymmetries in perception of media bias

While there is an association between need for structure and belief that media was intentionally deceitful among both republican and democratic participants, this link was reliably stronger in the case of Republican participants.

Asymmetries in link between need for structure and perception of deceit in media

When participants read an essay about the misinformation spread by the political party opposite their own affiliation, there was a positive association between need for structure and their attributions of media as intentionally deceitful. 

Learn Before

Related

Learn After