HME文献11 Perceiving Bias in the News, The Hostile Media Phenomenon Revisited.pdfVIP

Perceiving Bias in the News: The Hostile Media Phenomenon Revisited Jason E. Glass Mark Peffley James M. Avery Dept. Political Science University of Kentucky Note: Not for citation without the authors’ permission. Prepared for presentation at the 2000 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, Illinois, April 27-30. The authors would like to thank Steven Voss and Ellen Riggle for a variety of helpful comments throughout the project. Introduction By virtually all accounts, the mass media play a crucial role in American politics. For most citizens, the media -- particularly television and the press -- provides the only portal through which to view political reality. Increasingly, however, the public has become disenchanted with its news source. A variety of studies document plummeting ratings of the media as a fair, trustworthy, and impartial source of political information. To many journalists, the growing tendency of the public to discount the news as biased and inaccurate is one of the more unsettling criticisms of their profession. After all, good journalism in the U.S. is often equated with accurate, balanced and unbiased coverage of important issues (Entman 1989). Yet, a variety of groups -- from Accuracy in the Media (a conservative media watchdog group) to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (a liberal group) -- routinely accuse the media of biased coverage on a range of political issues. And while many Americans do not perceive bias in the media (Schneider and Lewis 1985; Beck 1991; Dalton, Beck, and Huckfeldt 1998), a growing 1 number do. In the midst of the Lewinsky scandal (October 1998), for example, only a little more than a third of the pub