Personal Bias or Government Bias? Testing the Hostile Media Effect in a Regulated Press System

A Three-Decade Retrospective on the Hostile Media Effect

“…Gunther and his colleagues usefully extended this early research by demonstrating, in a number of laboratory studies, that classic and relative hostile media effects emerge for media coverage of a variety of topics that involve labor, health, and research controversies (Christen, Kannaovakun, & Gunther, 2002;Gunther et al, , 2009Gunther et al, , 2012Gunther & Liebhart, 2006;. Laboratory-based hostile media effects have emerged on an array of other political, social, and even sports issues as well (Arpan & Raney, 2003;Chia et al, 2007;Hartmann & Tanis, 2013;Kim & Pasadeos, 2007;Matheson & Dursun, 2001).…”

“…Oddly, but perhaps not surprisingly (given the ways faddish terms can sometimes diffuse across a research community without eliciting scrutiny), there is no single, widely-accepted definition of the concept. Instead, a variety of helpful definitionsbasically similar, yet subtly and slightly different -have been offered, with terms like "process" and "phenomenon" sometimes used to introduce the concept, and definitions frequently, though not always, emphasizing that media coverage must be "neutral" or perhaps "controversial" in order to elicit divergent perceptions (see Arpan & Raney, 2003;Chia, Yong, Wong, & Koh, 2007;Goldman & Mutz, 2011;Gunther, Miller, & Liebhart, 2009;Hansen & Kim, 2011;Huge & Glynn, 2010;Vallone et al, 1985).…”

“…In deference to Vallone et al (1985), some scholars have defined the hostile media effect with the "partisan" term, as when Hansen and Kim (2011) described the phenomenon as one "in which partisans perceive a neutral news report as biased against their side" (p. 169; see also Chia et al, 2007). Other definitions have explicitly called on a related term, "involvement."…”

Public understanding of the politics of global warming in the news media: the hostile media approach

“…In the study of HMP, partisanship is a broadly defined attitudinal term that has been operationalized in relation to diverse contexts such as group membership and the extremity of one's attitudes toward an issue (Chia et al, 2007;Gunther, 1988Gunther, , 1992. Gunther and Liebhart (2006) argue that partisans-because of their commitment to an issue-tend to have heightened sensitivity to coverage of that issue which results in defensive or biased processing of news coverage.…”

Perceived Poll Bias and Inference of Biased Poll Impact in the 2010 U.S. Midterm Elections: Media Performance in the Eyes of the Beholder

“…Numerous studies reported support of the hostile media effect on issues such as genetically modified food (Chia et al, 2007;Gunther & Schmitt, 2004;Giner-Sorolla & Chaiken, 1994;Matheson & Dursun, 2001), news coverage of presidential elections (Dalton, Beck, & Huckfeldt, 1998), and broadcast news (Arpan & Raney, 2003;Morris, 2007). Coe et al (2008) examined perceptions of bias between partisan groups across three different news sources of political information which represent different ideological orientations: Cable News Network (CNN), Fox News Channel, and Comedy Central's The Daily Show.…”