The hostile media effect, originally deemed the hostile media phenomenon and sometimes called hostile media perception, is a perceptual theory of mass communication that refers to the tendency for individuals with a strong preexisting attitude on an issue to perceive media coverage as biased against their side and in favor of their antagonists' point of view. Partisans from opposite sides of an issue will tend to find the same coverage to be biased against them. The phenomenon was first proposed and studied experimentally by Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper.
Studies
In 1982, the second major study of this phenomenon was undertaken; pro-Palestinian students and pro-Israeli students at Stanford University were shown the same news filmstrips pertaining to the then-recent Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees by Christian Lebanese militia fighters abetted by the Israeli army in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. On a number of objective measures, both sides found that these identical news clips were slanted in favor of the other side. Pro-Israeli students reported seeing more anti-Israel references and fewer favorable references to Israel in the news report and pro-Palestinian students reported seeing more anti-Palestinian references, and so on. Both sides said a neutral observer would have a more negative view of their side from viewing the clips, and that the media would have excused the other side where it blamed their side.
Subsequent studies have found hostile media effects related to other political conflicts, such as strife in Bosnia, immigration in the U.S. and in U.S. presidential elections, as well as in other areas, such as media coverage of the South Korean National Security Act, the 1997 United Parcel Service Teamsters strike, genetically modified food, and sports.
The effect was originally dubbed "hostile media phenomenon" by Vallone et al., and is occasionally referred to as "hostile media perception," since it seems to precipitate the effects of media. In a 2015 meta-analysis of the subject, Perloff said "hostile media effect" is the most often used term:The most common term is "hostile media effect," perhaps because scholars appreciate that the "effect" term cuts to the heart of the mass communication research enterprise and captures the theoretically intriguing aspect of the hostile media phenomenon. (703) The effect appears to be something of a disconfirmation bias, or "a contrast bias – a deviation of judgment in which a partisan individual perceives or evaluates media content to be further away, in terms of valence, from his or her own point of view." In other words, the intention of the reporter or the story is irrelevant – those "partisans" who consume the content find the content that is hostile to their point of view on their own.
An oft-cited forerunner to Vallone et al.'s study was conducted by Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril in 1954. Princeton and Dartmouth students were shown a filmstrip of a controversial Princeton-Dartmouth football game. Asked to count the number of infractions committed by both sides, students at both universities "saw" many more infractions committed by the opposing side, in addition to making different generalizations about the game. Hastorf and Cantril concluded that "there is no such 'thing' as a 'game' existing 'out there' in its own right which people merely 'observe.' ... For the 'thing' simply is not the same for different people whether the 'thing' is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach."