HME文献32 Testing the Hostile Media Effect Under Selective Exposure.pdfVIP

Testing the Hostile Media Effect under Selective Exposure* Anna-Maria Mende, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany Proceeding of the 58th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association Montreal, Canada, May 22-26, 2008 Abstract: This pape r describes the results of two combined expe riments (N =241) which were designed to analyze interdepe ndences between two well-known theories of media eff ects: the hostile media phe nomenon and selective expos ure. We could repl icate hostile media eff ects among pa rtisansf or and against a controversial urban construction p roject: subjects pe rceived a balanced newspap er article as biased against their own opinion. We have f urther repl icated selective media recept ion depe ndent on the individual ’s opinion towards the controversy : par tisans read more content which was in line with their own opinion than contrasting content. Most interestingly, if the two eff ects are tested together, the hostile media eff ect vanishes. Hence, par tisans tend to f ind bias in content they are f orced to read, whereas they pe rceive it as more neutral if they have selected the article themselves. These results indicate that the design of traditional hostile media studies might artif icially induce the pe rcept ion of hostile media bias. * The author wishes to acknowledge fruitful comments of two anonymous reviewers. 1 Introduction Many of the most difficult but also the most exciting questions of communication science deal with human information processing. The perception and processing of information obtained from mass media seems to follow particular rules, especially with regard to the perception of bias in media content. It is also highly relevant, which pieces of information people se