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Partisan Differences in Opinionated News Perceptions: A Test of the Hostile Media Effect

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Abstract

The proliferation of opinion and overt partisanship in cable news raises questions about how audiences perceive this content. Of particular interest is whether audiences effectively perceive bias in opinionated news programs, and the extent to which there are partisan differences in these perceptions. Results from a series of three online experiments produce evidence for a relative hostile media phenomenon in the context of opinionated news. Although, overall, audiences perceive more story and host bias in opinionated news than in non-opinionated news, these perceptions—particularly perceptions of the host—vary as a function of partisan agreement with the news content. Specifically, issue partisans appear to have a “bias against bias,” whereby they perceive less bias in opinionated news with which they are predisposed to agree than non-partisans and especially partisans on the other side of the issue.

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Notes

  1. An online recruitment appeal, which described the study as one about television news and politics, was emailed to friends and colleagues who were not asked to take part in the study themselves but to forward the appeal to their own friends, family members, colleagues, etc. Subjects were also recruited via an online advertisement posted on craigslist. As an incentive, participants were offered the chance to win one of several gift certificates to http://Amazon.com.

  2. Each of the clips used in Study 1 was roughly five minutes long. Approximately the first two minutes consisted of a report from the show’s host (or news correspondent Ray Suarez, in the case of NewsHour) on Bush’s speech at the Coast Guard commencement, which included taped footage of Bush. While the PBS segment provided a relatively neutral view, Olbermann openly criticized Bush for trying to invoke fear in the American people in order to mislead them into supporting the war, and Beck emphasized the importance of continuing U.S. military involvement in Iraq in order to deter al Qaeda. The final two-thirds of each broadcast consisted of an interview exchange. In the case of Olbermann and Beck, the exchange was with a single guest sympathetic to their respective views, whereas the NewsHour’s Ray Suarez interviewed two guests representing each side of the debate. The Countdown and Glenn Beck segments originally aired on May 23, 2007; the NewsHour segment aired on May 24, 2007. The Glenn Beck segment used in Study 2 originally aired on October 3, 2007, the day of Bush’s veto of the SCHIP reauthorization bill, whereas both the NewsHour and Countdown segments aired on October 18, in the aftermath of the House of Representatives’ failed veto override. Despite this discrepancy, all three segments similarly focused on details of the vetoed legislation and its surrounding partisan debate. Lehrer opened the NewsHour segment with news of the failed veto override. This was followed by a more detailed report on SCHIP, its proposed expansion, and the president’s veto. Much of the segment featured alternating sound-bites from the bill’s opponents and supporters debating on the House floor. Beck and Olbermann provided commentary and reporting on SCHIP, followed by an interview with a guest sympathetic to their respective views. Beck condemned the SCHIP expansion as an attempt at socialized medicine, and Olbermann extolled the virtues of SCHIP and openly criticized Bush for his veto. The Study 2 segments were approximately four minutes in length.

  3. For each of the three studies, a pre-test was conducted online with a sample of undergraduates to ensure that the manipulation of opinionation was effective. In all cases, perceptions of news bias varied significantly across conditions in the expected direction, suggesting a successful manipulation. For the Study 1 and 2 pre-tests, subjects were randomly assigned to read print transcripts of the news clips. Identifying information about the news program and host was deleted to ensure that the stories were perceived as intended without being confounded by source preconceptions.

  4. The other items included unfair, doesn’t tell the whole story, inaccurate, can’t be trusted, mostly gives opinions, unqualified, inexpert, unreliable, unprofessional, and incompetent.

  5. Because participants self-selected into partisan groups, it is possible that the groups differed systematically on demographic and other background variables. For this reason, all analyses were repeated as analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), with age, education, and political orientation as covariates. Because the ANCOVA results differed neither substantively nor statistically from the ANOVA results, and because the use of ANCOVA to adjust for pre-existing covariate differences among groups is a delicate and controversial technique (see Keppell and Wickens 2004, pp. 340–341), the ANOVA results and unadjusted means are reported in favor of the ANCOVA results and adjusted means.

  6. The Sidak correction was applied assuming a family of three tests, since there was a maximum of three pairwise comparisons across partisan groups within each news condition. Pairwise contrasts were only tested for a given news condition if the simple effect of partisanship within that condition was significant.

  7. The ANOVA assumption of homogeneity of variance was not met. Because this threatens to bias the ANOVA results, the recommendations of Keppel and Wickens (2004) were followed in adopting a more conservative value for the nominal α level (i.e., p < .025) when testing the omnibus main and interaction effects. Further, given the presence of a significant interaction effect, simple effects were analyzed as separate single-factor designs rather than using a pooled error term. Finally, pairwise contrasts were tested using t-tests that assume unequal variances. Computation of the standard error and degrees of freedom for these tests followed the equations provided by Keppell and Wickens (2004, pp. 156–158).

  8. While the general pattern of findings hold true, in that all subjects, regardless of source preconceptions, perceived significantly greater story and host bias in the opinionated versus the non-opinionated news conditions, these perceptions were more pronounced among those without any source preconceptions. While these results suggest that audiences are more sensitive to bias in opinionated news when they hold no preconceptions about the program, this trend occurred uniformly across partisan groups (i.e., there was no three-way interaction between news condition, partisanship, and preconceptions)—thereby alleviating any concerns that the pattern of partisan differences in Studies 1 and 2 were a function of source preconceptions.

  9. Notably, if the analyses were repeated, substituting a measure of general political partisanship (i.e., conservative/republican vs. liberal/democrat) in place of issue partisanship, the interactions between partisanship and news condition were generally weakened and, in some cases, disappeared entirely. This suggests that the selective perception of opinionated news content was cued by individuals’ identification as issue partisans more so than by their general political party membership or ideological orientation.

  10. In Study 2, the patterns of selective perception reported in Table 4 were sharpened among partisan extremists. Specifically, anti-government healthcare extremists perceived the non-opinionated news story as having a significantly greater pro-SCHIP bias than pro-government healthcare extremists and non-partisans (both p < .05). However, even among extremists, there were no partisan differences in perceived story bias in either of the opinionated news conditions. With regard to perceived host bias, the pattern of means was identical to that in Table 4; however, within each of the three news conditions, all pairwise comparisons between partisan groups were significant at p < .05. While these findings suggest that the method by which participants were classified as partisan in the main analyses (i.e., Tables 3, 4, and 5) may have masked the true extent of partisan selectivity, it is important to keep in mind that the results using the extreme partisan classification are relatively unstable given the low cell sizes for extreme partisans (ranging from n = 9 to n = 32). Moreover, in Study 3, the patterns of means and pairwise differences were identical to those reported in Table 5, though the interaction between partisanship and news condition for both dependent variables was no longer significant (this could be a function of the limited sample size in the extremist cells). The Study 1 analyses were not repeated due to the small overall sample size. The complete results for Study 2 and Study 3 using the extremist partisan classification are available from the author by request.

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Acknowledgments

Funding for this research was provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. The author is extremely grateful to Vincent Price, Joseph Cappella, and Michael Delli Carpini for their advice and encouragement throughout the project, and to the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on previous versions of this manuscript.

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  1. School of Communication, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC, 20016-8017, USA

    Lauren Feldman

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Feldman, L. Partisan Differences in Opinionated News Perceptions: A Test of the Hostile Media Effect. Polit Behav 33, 407–432 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9139-4

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