HME文献33 The impact of individual and interpersonal factors on perceived news media bias.pdfVIP

Political Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2003 The Impact of Individual and Interpersonal Factors on Perceived News Media Bias William P. Eveland Jr. School of Journalism and Communication Ohio State University Dhavan V. Shah School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Department of Political Science University of Wisconsin–Madison A large percentage of the public believes that the news media are biased, and the major- ity of these individuals consider the direction of bias to be against their own viewpoints. Past research has examined how individual factors such as strength of partisanship or extent of political involvement heighten bias perceptions, but little attention has been paid to interpersonal factors such as the ideological similarity or dissimilarity of personal com- munication networks. Results of a national survey show that perceptions of media bias were unrelated to the overall amount of discussion but were positively related to conver- sations with ideologically like-minded individuals. Moreover, the impact of conversations with similar others was stronger among Republicans than among Democrats, a finding consistent with recent work on news self-coverage of media bias claims. KEY WORDS: hostile-media phenomenon, media credibility, media bias, interpersonal networks, biased sampling, spiral of silence Research on perceptions of media bias and their antecedents falls under diverse labels such as media credibility, trust in news, and the hostile-media phe- nomenon. Many scholars who focus on media credibility consider source vari- ables (e.g., media organization or actual news content) to be of paramount importance (Lichter, Amundson, Noyes, 1988; Lichter Noyes, 1996; Lowry Shidler, 1995; Sigelman, 1973). Others studying trust in news (e.g., Gunther, 1992; Stamm Dube, 1994) have argued that individual