Hostile media effect

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 that ostensibly neutral, even-handed media coverage of the topic is biased against their side and in favor of their antagonists' point of view. Proponents of the hostile media effect argue that this finding cannot necessarily be attributed to the presence of bias in the news reports, since partisans from opposing sides of an issue perceive the same coverage differently. Despite some journalists' best intentions to report news in a fair and objective way, partisans are motivated to see neutral content as harboring a hostile bias. The phenomenon was first proposed and studied experimentally by Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper.