(Mis)perception of bias in print media: How depth of content evaluation affects the perception of hostile bias in an objective news report.

The hostile media effect describes the tendency for partisans to evaluate media content as relatively biased against their positions. The present study investigates what specific contextual elements of a news report contribute to this effect and how it may be mitigated by the depth of content evaluation. A online study of 102 participants revealed that less bias is perceived in a newspaper article when evaluating specific aspects of the article with the text available for reference than when evaluating the overall bias without referring to the text. Moreover, being asked to consider overall article bias increased subsequent ratings of bias in the discrete elements of the text. These results suggest that the perception of media bias may be counteracted by encouraging deep, evidence-based considerations of where the alleged bias might lie, but only if this happens before the reader has the chance to form an opinion based on a cursory assessment.