If you ask a committed conservative about the mainstream media, they will likely tell you it is a liberal machine designed to undermine their values. If you ask a committed progressive about the same outlets, they will often complain that the news is corporatist, draws false equivalencies, and normalizes right-wing rhetoric. Both groups cannot be right about the same coverage at the same time.
This phenomenon is known in psychology as the “hostile media effect.” It describes a robust tendency for people with strong opinions to perceive neutral news coverage as biased against their side. When shown the exact same news clip or article, opposing partisans do not just disagree on the issues. They disagree on what they just saw. Each side insists the reporter focused too much on the opponent’s arguments and unfairly scrutinized their own.1, 2
The effect is not simply a matter of people disliking bad press. It is a fundamental processing error in how we categorize information. We tend to view our own side’s position not as an opinion, but as objective truth. When a journalist presents a balanced story that gives time to the other side, partisans do not see fairness. They see a distortion of the facts.3
The scientific understanding of this phenomenon began with a dispute over coverage of the Middle East. In the early 1980s, researchers at Stanford University showed television news segments about the Beirut massacre to pro-Arab and pro-Israeli students. The segments were identical. Yet the pro-Arab students believed the clips excused Israel and were biased in its favor. The pro-Israeli students believed the exact same clips were anti-Israel propaganda that unfairly blamed their side.1
This was the first empirical demonstration of the hostile media effect. Since then, the finding has been replicated across dozens of contexts, from labor strikes and elections to genetically modified foods and climate change.4, 5, 6, 7 The pattern is consistent: the more strongly you care about an issue, the more likely you are to perceive neutral coverage as hostile.
The effect persists even when the media content is objectively balanced. In fact, attempts by journalists to provide equal time often strengthen the feeling of bias. To a partisan, giving equal time to a viewpoint they consider factually wrong is not neutrality. It is a hostile act of legitimizing falsehoods.3
The history
The foundational study by Vallone, Ross, and Lepper emerged from a real-world puzzle. News organizations received angry letters from both sides of controversial issues, each claiming the coverage was slanted against them.
The researchers hypothesized that this was not just partisans pressuring editors. They suspected a genuine perceptual bias. By controlling the stimulus (showing everyone the exact same primetime news segments), they proved that the bias was not in the tape, but in the viewer. The pro-Israeli students reported seeing more anti-Israel references. The pro-Arab students reported seeing more pro-Israel references. Both sides cited the same segments to prove opposite points.1
Our brains do not passively absorb news. We actively monitor it for fairness. This monitoring process is systematically flawed.
We have a tendency to classify neutral information as hostile if it does not explicitly support our side. In one study of a United Parcel Service strike, students viewed a news story that included arguments from both the union and the company. Partisans on both sides categorized the neutral background information as biased against them. They kept score of the broadcast, but their scoring system was asymmetric. They tallied the points made for the opposition as bias, while regarding points made for their own side as background facts that did not count as credit to the reporter.4, 3
There is also a question of selective recall. Some research suggests we remember the parts of the story that made us angry better than the parts that pleased us. We ruminate on the insults and forget the compliments. However, later studies suggest it is not that we simply forget the good parts, but that we interpret them differently. We view positive coverage as insufficient and negative coverage as catastrophic.8, 9
The debate
Early explanations of the hostile media effect focused on biased memory. The hypothesis was straightforward: partisans selectively recall information that contradicts their views while forgetting information that supports them. When asked to evaluate the news story afterward, they remember more hostile content than actually appeared.
However, several well-controlled studies have failed to support this mechanism. When researchers measure recall immediately after exposure, partisans do not show consistent asymmetries in what they remember.8 The bias appears to occur during encoding and interpretation, not during retrieval.
More recent explanations focus on categorization and standards of evidence. Partisans apply different thresholds for what counts as a legitimate argument. Claims supporting their position are treated as facts requiring little justification. Claims supporting the opposition are treated as contested assertions requiring extraordinary proof. Under this asymmetric standard, balanced coverage will always feel unbalanced.3, 9
We generally do not care if a random blog is biased against us. We care when major news outlets are biased. The hostile media effect is driven in part by our anxiety about public opinion.
We judge media not just by what it says to us, but by what we fear it is saying to others. This is related to the third-person effect, the belief that media messages have a stronger influence on other people than they do on ourselves. When partisans see a news story they perceive as flawed, they worry that the general public will be swayed by it.5, 10
This explains why the effect is stronger for mass media than for niche publications. If we think the audience is small or already converted, we are less likely to perceive the content as hostile. But if we believe the reach is broad, that millions of undecided voters are watching, our sensitivity to bias increases. We are not just defending our own beliefs. We are worried about protecting a broader audience from what we perceive as disinformation.5, 11
By the numbers
Visuals matter as much as text. Recent research has expanded the hostile media effect to imagery. In a study using news photos of politicians, opposing partisans viewed the same images differently.
When shown a photo of a politician, supporters tended to rate it as more unflattering compared to how opponents rated it. However, the effect size for visuals appears smaller than for text. While text allows for specific arguments that trigger defensive processing, images are more ambiguous. When text and images are combined, the text tends to drive the hostility perception more than the photo itself.12
The rise of social media has complicated this phenomenon. In theory, the ability to curate our own feeds should reduce hostile media perceptions. We can block the outlets we distrust and subscribe only to those we prefer. This creates what some researchers call a “friendly media phenomenon,” where most of the content we actually consume feels supportive.13
However, social media also introduces new triggers for hostility. Even if a news article is neutral, a toxic comment section can skew our perception of the article itself. Researchers have found that when people read a balanced news story accompanied by uncivil, partisan user comments, they perceive the story as more biased. The hostility of the crowd bleeds into our judgment of the journalism.14, 15
Furthermore, algorithms that drive engagement often feed us content from the other side designed to outrage us. This keeps the hostile media effect alive. When we see a clip from an opposing network go viral, we often view it out of context and framed by the criticism of our peers. This reinforces the belief that the broader media environment is systematically biased against us.16
Recognizing the hostile media effect does not mean all media is perfectly neutral. Biased journalism certainly exists. But the research suggests that our internal bias detectors are calibrated to produce false positives. We see hostility even when it is not there.17, 2
The downstream effects of this perception are significant. When we believe the mainstream media is systematically hostile to our side, we retreat to partisan sources that affirm our worldview without challenge. This deepens polarization, as we lose a shared set of facts to debate.18, 19 Perceived media bias is associated with lower trust in journalism, reduced civic participation, and greater affective polarization.20, 21
If you watch a news segment and feel a surge of indignation that your side was treated unfairly, it is possible the reporter has an agenda. But it is also possible that you are experiencing the cognitive friction of encountering a perspective outside your own. The hostile media effect is a reminder that balance does not feel like balance to a partisan. It feels like an attack.
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Why does the news always feel biased against your side?
