HOSTILE MEDIA(BIASED)?

Is the media biased and there by perceived as hostile? As individual human beings we all perceive information, people, and situations in our own unique way. We all have our own mental grid in which we use to perceive the world around us based on experiences, education, and beliefs and it is through this grid that we interpret what the media is trying to communicate to us.
The hostile media effect describes the tendency for people who are highly
involved in an issue to see news coverage of that issue as biased,
particularly as biased against their own point of view. Anecdotal evidence of
this effect is commonplace: liberal groups typically describe the media as a
lapdog for corporate interests, while conservatives tend to see it as a
left-wing conspiracy.
But, in fact, quite a bit of news content does have some degree of slant. Many
news stories, by virtue of the events they cover or the sources they include,
would be seen by disinterested observers as favoring a particular point of
view. Most journalists presumably believe they cleave to a professional
standard of objectivity or balance, but most people in the media audience may
not see it that way.
The prospect of evaluations of news content with an apparent slant toward one
side or another puts an interesting twist on conceptualizations of the hostile
media perception. If even neutral viewers would not rate the news as neutral,
how is one to assess the conjecture that highly involved partisans are prone
to biased perceptions of media bias? The answer is that, while the perception
of bias is an inherently subjective evaluation, the hostile media perception
does predict an objective and testable outcome
The first published experiment illustrated the hostile media perception
dramatically. Vallone, Ross, and Lepper (1985), showing news broadcasts of the
conflict in the Middle East to Arab and Israeli students, found that both
groups saw the news as biased in favor of the other side. The phenomenon was
highlighted by the fact that nonpartisans saw the same content as neutral. The
researchers proposed two central explanations. One, a perceptual bias,
suggests that partisans actually perceive and recall a disproportionate amount
of disagreeable content. The other, an evaluative bias, argues that partisans
assess the same content using different standards, so that attempts at
evenhandedness are nevertheless seen as unfair. A more detailed discussion of
theoretical background can be found in Giner-Sorolla and Chaiken (1994).
If one has a strong identification to a particular side of an issue no matter what the media says, it will be construed as biased.