HME文献35 Why partisans see mass.pdfVIP

Hostile Media Effect 1 Why Partisans See Mass Media as Biased The mass media audience, once thought to be a vast but vulnerable sea of sameness, appears instead to be composed of diverse and active individuals who react in very different ways to the same messages (Bauer, 1973). No group better exemplifies the active audience paradigm than partisans, those highly involved individuals who hold strong and deeply felt opinions on an issue. For some issues, large numbers of people may have partisan viewpoints. For other, often less salient topics, partisan numbers may be smaller. But partisan groups and their members are important beyond their numbers because they are the ones who campaign and lobby, who demonstrate and parade and picket, who promote their viewpoints in countless ways and who sometimes turn to extreme or anti-social behaviors. These partisan individuals pose a particular problem for mass media, for recent research has shown that neutral news reports – news reports a disinterested observer would assess as fair and balanced – will be seen by partisans on opposing sides o f the issue as biased in favor of the other side. This “biased perception of media bias” (Vallone, Ross and Lepper, 1985, p. 578), also known as the hostile media perception, has been replicated often enough to qualify as a robust finding (see e.g., Christen, Konnavakun Gunther, 1998; Giner-Sorolla Chaiken, 1994; Perloff, 1989). But very little research has examined the psychological mechanisms underlying this partisan perception. This report will describe research designed to test three different explanations for partisans’ perceptions of media bias. Hostile Media Effect 2 It is likely that editors and reporters have been uncomfortably aware of the hostile media perception sin