Hostile Media Effect
Hostile Media Phenomenon · Hostile Media Perception
A perceptual theory of mass communication that refers to the tendency for individuals with a strong pre-existing attitude on an issue to perceive media coverage as biased against their side and in favor of their antagonists' point of view.
Origin
The phenomenon was first established experimentally in 1985 by Lee Ross, Robert Vallone, and Mark Lepper at Stanford University. They showed pro-Israeli and pro-Arab participants identical news coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre; both groups rated the same footage as biased against their side. An earlier precursor came from a 1954 study by Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril, who found students from rival universities watching the same football game each believed the other team had committed more fouls.