http://jmq.sagepub.com/Communication Quarterly

Journalism & Mass

http://jmq.sagepub.com/content/80/2/282The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/107769900308000204

2003 80: 282Journalism & Mass Communication QuarterlyDave D'Alessio

An Experimental Examination of Readers' Perceptions of Media Bias  

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of: 

  Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication

found at: can beJournalism & Mass Communication QuarterlyAdditional services and information for

   

  http://jmq.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

 

http://jmq.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:  

What is This? 

- Jun 1, 2003Version of Record >> at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

AN EXPERIMENTAL EXAMINATION OF READERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF MEDIA BIAS By Dave D‘AIessio

Perceptions of media bias were explored by manipulating expectations of bias and news topic. Readers were more likely to designate material opposing their own viewpoints as biased. Perception of bias was topic- dependent and statements most often viewed as biased were quotations, rather than other types of statements.

Examination of media bias has tended to follow two branches. The first examines media content, whether by rhetorical, critical, or content analysis, often focusing on American presidential campaign coverage. D’Alessio and Allen found fifty-nine published content analyses of 1948-1996 presidential campaigns, including newspaper articles, TV news, news magazine photos, and expressions on newscasters’ faces.‘ Other analyses examined coverage of campaigns for house, senate, or local races, or coverage of women, blacks, or fundamentalist Christians, to name a few, in order to measure whether reports are balanced or unbiased.*

Less thoroughly examined is the second branch: audience perceptions of media bias. People who consider news media biased are less likely to believe them and to use them, with obvious consequences both for people and for media.3 This study examines audience perception of media bias to discover what content elicits the designation of “biased.”

Audience Responses. Research examining how and why the public perceives bias in the media can be summarized: First, perception of bias is subjective. Different people looking at identical content can come to idiosyncratic, often opposing, judgments. Second, perception of bias is relativistic. ”Biased” often means ”disagrees with us, the users,” regardless of users’ awareness of any of their own biases or the overall balance of the content.

The subjectivity element has been established under both field and experimental conditions. For instance, Dautrich and Dineen reported a survey finding that 22% of respondents believed media coverage of the 1996 presidential election favored the Democrats and 21% said it favored the republican^.^ By most content analytic measures the coverage in the aggregate was fairly well-balan~ed.~

Dave D’Alessio is assistant professor of communication sciences, University of Connecti-

Introduction

JbMC Quarterly Vol. SO, No. 2 cut-Stamford. Summer2003 282-294 02003 AEJMC

282 [OUFXAUSM 6’ M A S S COMMUNlCAnON (&ARERLY

at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Watts and his colleagues tracked public opinion data on percep- tion of liberal media biases along with actual content from newspapers, wire services, and at least one television network. They found that belief in liberal bias was unrelated to actual valences in content: rather, perception of bias was related to volume of media self-coverage of bias issues, which was generally triggered by charges of liberal bias by conservative elites. In short, coverage of people talking about media bias meant the public was more likely to label the media as biased, regardless of actual content.6

Under more controlled conditions, Stevenson and Greene presented undergraduates a variety of news stories both favorable and unfavorable to 1976 presidential candidates Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Participants marked their reactions in the margins of articles as they read them, offering significantly more reactions to material they perceived as biased than that they considered unbiased. They were more likely to agree with, disagree with, and question material in stories they perceived as biased.'

Relativity has also been explored. Giner-Sorolla and Chaiken explored audience reactions to specific content elements.8 Social Judgment theory suggests that people process issue statements relative to their own positions: statements close to one's own position fall within a "latitude of acceptance" and are judged as agreeable, while positions substantially different are grouped into the "latitude of reje~tion."~ The researchers reasoned that statements in news reports that fell into the latitude of rejection would more likely be seen as "biased than other statements. They located students who were on either side of two issues-the Arab-Israeli conflict and abortion-and presented TV news material covering key arguments on both sides. Partisans on the Middle East judged coverage favorable to the opposition as a source of bias in the reports, presumably because the subjects focused on statements in their latitudes of rejection. However, partisans on abortion did not reject media reports of opposition statements and did not describe them as biased.

Vallone, Ross, and Lepper'O showed students who were pro- Arab, pro-Israeli, or neutral six TV news clips of the 1982 Israeli incursion into Beirut. Pro-Israeli viewers believed the clips were anti- Israeli; pro-Arab viewers saw the same clips as pro-Israeli. Vallone, Ross, and Lepper called this the hostile media phenomenon, attributing it not only to a Social-Judgment-like mechanism but also to selective perception.

Social Judgment theory implies a tendency to simplify information processing by reducing a continuum of issue positions to a relatively small number (acceptable/rejectable) of categories.'l In a related process, Rouner, Slater, and Buddenbaum have shown how readers consider the source in evaluating whether a statement is biased. They provided readers with short biographies of speakers written to suggest the speaker would be biased or unbiased on an issue. Their finding that readers evaluated the speakers' statements based on what they had been told about the source, rather than the actual statement content,12 suggests how a "limited processing" model may apply: when evaluating

AN EXPER~MENTAL EWATIONOFREADERS'PERCEPT~ONSOF MEDU BIAS 283 at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

information one is disinterested in or unable to process directly, one evaluates it on the basis of contextual cues.13

Gunther and others have also explored the hostile media effect. In 1992 Gunther14 used national phone survey data to demonstrate how the groups one belongs to influence perceptions of media coverage of issues important to those groups: specifically, Democrats saw newspapers and TV news as too favorable to Republicans, while Republicans considered both too favorable to Democrats.

Gunther, Christen, Liebhart, and Chia recruited partisans highly involved in the issue of primate research (from animal rights groups and from among workers at a primate research center) and presented four articles: two focused on animal rights issues and two on the value of primate research. Readers holding either position on the issue considered the articles slanted against their position. More important, the researchers found that perception of individual article bias led directly to perception of general media bias.15

Gunther and Christed6examined the hostile media phenomenon and individual impression of public opinion. In a phone survey, they located hostile media effects on the threats from radon gas and on physician-assisted suicide, but not for genetically altered foods and belief in extraterrestrial visits. Finding that people projected their own views onto public opinion as a whole, they also showed that this projection process was moderatedbyperceptions of positions advocated by the media.

Applied Social Judgment The0 y. This summary suggests how media users process news content from the perspective of their idiosyncratic positions. Social Judgment theory is useful in examining the hostile media phenomenon because it also explains disparate outcomes that have been observed. For instance, Giner-Sorolla and Chaiken found that while people systematically rejected certain material related to the Middle East conflict, the same people did not for the issue of ab0rti0n.l~ Similarly, only two of four topics examined by Gunther and Christen showed hostile media effects.'* Social Judgment theory indicates that message rejection (i.e., the sizes of the latitudes of acceptance and rejection) is topic-dependent, and is determined in part by such factors as the salience of the topic to the individual.

Structural Elements of News. Notably absent, apart from work on source influence, is examination of which structural elements in a news report cause the greatest reaction and are thus most likely to lead to charges of bias. From a structural standpoint, a simple news report (as opposed to analysis or op-ed material) consists of three basic types of statements:

Basic factual material (e.g., who, what, where, how, when) that is readily verifiable;

Reporters' quasi-objective attempts to summarize the fundamental reasoning underlying debate on the issue, for positions on all sides of the issue; and

284 \OURNAUSM b M a s s COMMUN~CA~ON QUARTERLY

at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Quotations from proponents offered by reporters to illustrate their summaries.

Each of these fulfills a different function: factual statements enable readers to engage in surveillance of their environment, summary statements are correlative in nature, and quotations are essentially evidential. Additionally, each type of statement has a distinct ”source”: facts supercede reader and reporter, summaries are implicitly the reporter’s own observations, and quotations are the creations of sources being cited.

There has been little consideration of which of these types of statement is most likely to evoke reader response, including perception that the statement is “biased.” Similarly, the theoretical frameworks cited above offer no indication as to which type of statement evokes the greatest response. However, the different functions of the different statement types suggests at least the possibility that readers process them differently, leading in turn to possibly different types of cognitive responses.

Hypotheses and Research Questions. Consistent with this discussion and the predictions of Social Judgment theory, we expect consumers of news will vary in describing content as biased. Specifically, we hypothesize:

H1: Following from Stevenson and Greene, consumers ”cued” to expect that content may be biased will be more likely to describe it as biased than consumers who have not;

H2: Willingness to describe news content as biased will be topic dependent; and

H3: Consumers will be more likely to describe statements that oppose their positions as biased than statements which agree.

One research question was also posed:

RQ: Are consumers more likely to describe factual statements, reporters’ summaries of issue positions, or quotations as biased?

Data was gathered using a pencil-and-paper instrument that contained stimulus materials, the cued-status manipulation, and questionnaire items.

Bias Stimuli. Dummy newspaper stories were created. First, to assure that the articles would be salient to participants, twenty-three students at a large, northeastern university were informally surveyed to identify three issues important to them and key pro and con arguments on each: campus housing overcrowding, the shortage of parking, and the performance of President George W. Bush.

A N E X P E R I M E ~ E ~ ~ O N O F R E A D E R S ’ P E R C E P T I O N S O F M E D ~ A BIAS 285

Method

at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

The article on each topic consisted of eleven paragraphs:

A one-paragraph summary lead describing a town- hall-style meeting on campus on the topic;

Eight paragraphs on issues arising at the meeting (four of the eight summarized the positions of meeting participants and the other four quoted supporters of those positions, with half the positions on one side of the issue and half on the other); and

Two closing paragraphs stating that the participants had been heard and that another meeting would be scheduled soon.

The three stories each contained three paragraphs of essentially factual material, two paragraphs each summarizing points for and against the topic of the article in the words of the writer, and two quotations each for and against the issue offered to support the writer's summaries. Arguments for the stories were chosen from those arguments supplied in the preliminary survey. Names, including the putative author and the fictitious speakers, were blacked out to avoid any source-related effects such as those discovered by Rouner, Slater, and Buddenbaum;I9 participants were told this would protect the privacy of the people in the article. "A" and "B" versions of each story were prepared. In each version of each story, supporting and opposing viewpoints alternated to control order effects.20

Instrument Construction. Participants completed informed consent forms and read an instruction sheet explaining that they would read a newspaper article. Questionnaires for participants being "cued" to expect biased material described the article as "potentially biased" three times, including twice in the first paragraph. Instructions for other participants were identical but omitted that phrase.

After reading the stimulus article, subjects responded to it on nine semantic differential-type items: bad/good, informative/uninformative, biased / balanced, accurate / mistaken, well-written / incoherent, colorful/dull, complete/lacking detail, fair/one-sided, and nice/mean. Then, as an aided-recall device, participants were presented another copy of the article and asked to circle portions they had thought biased when they read it first. Participants could also choose to indicate that the article was entirely biased or free from biasz1 Next, participants completed thirteen items from the Short Form Dogmatism Scale" as an experimental blind. Finally, participants completed a series of demographic and life-style-oriented items. Key items were whether the respondents lived on campus and had a car on campus; whether they self-described as conservative, moderate, or liberal; and whether they typically voted for more Republican candidates, more Democrats, or about equal numbers of each.

Conducting the Test. A total of 146 students were recruited from introductory communication classes; 61% (89) were female, and the

286 JOURNAUSM & Mass COMMUNICA~ON QUAKERLY

at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

majority (105,72%) were lower-division students. All received course extra credit for participation. Participants met at scheduled times, and copies of the twelve different questionnaire forms (two levels of cued- state by three topics by two different orders of paragraphs) were distributed randomly across all of the groups by confederates blind to the hypotheses.

Semantic Differential Items. The biased/balanced semantic differential item was used as a check of the cued-status manipulation: participants told that the article they were about to read was potentially biased were indeed more likely to describe it as ”biased” [t(144) = 3.41,

Participants who were more likely to describe the article as biased were less likely to describe it as fair (Y = -.452, p < .001), nice (Y = -.293, p < .001), or accurate (Y = -.198, p < .01). While the negative correlation of bias with fairness and niceness is intuitive, the relationship of perceived bias to perceived accuracy is particularly interesting. That correlation is subject to a second interpretation: that people perceive inaccurate stories as biased. However, readers are rarely able to evaluate the accuracy of what they read, and in this case the stories were entirely fictitious. But each participant is capable of evaluating the bias of a story, so the “bias implies inaccuracy” interpretation seems reasonable.

Eighty-five subjects (58%) reported that the story they had read was entirely free of bias. Eighteen (12%) believed the story was entirely biased, while thirty-nine (27%) circled an average of 2.8 paragraphs with biased content. The omnibus hypothesis test was conducted using belief that the article was free from bias as the dependent measure. We felt that using this variable would minimize the consequences of restriction in range.

Hypotheses Concerning Cuing and Topic Effects. To test the first two hypotheses, a three-way analysis of variance was conducted. The three independent variables were cued status (Hl), topic (H2), and order as a blocking variable (see Table 1). There were three statistically significant effects. However, the significant three-way interaction may be ananomaly: all eleven participants in the uncued condition who read the article on parking with the pro points listed first described the article as free of bias. This created a standard error for that cell of zero, inflating the F for the three-way interaction. Since as many as ten participants in other cells also described their article as free of bias, a total of eleven in the one cell is not beyond the possibility of mere chance, and so it is likely that the three-way interaction is a statistical accident.

There were no differences created by the order of points in the story. Unexpectedly, there was no significant main effect for cued- status. Instead, there was a significant cued-status by topic interaction. To interpret this interaction, we employed a least significant difference (LSD) test to compare the means of the six cells of the cued-status by topic interaction matrix. There were two significant differences among the six: participants who were not cued and read about parking were significantly more likely to say their article was free of bias than those

AN EXPERIMENTAL EXAMRUTION OF RFADERS’PERCEFTIONS OF MEDIA BIAS

p < .001].

287 at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

TABLE 1 ANOVA Results for Participants Stating Stimulus Article Was Free of Bias

by Cued-Status, Topic, and Order

Variable d.f. ss F P

Cued/not-cued (C)

Topic (T)

Order (0)

C X T

cxo T X O

C X T X O

Residual

1

2

1

2

1

2

2

134

.47 2.27 n.s.

2.60 6.24 <.01

.27 1.30 n.s.

1.63 3.90 <.05

.01 0.07 n.s.

.45 1.07 n.s.

2.52 6.04 <.01

27.92

who were cued and read about President Bush ( t = 4.64), or those who werenot cued and read the housing article (t = 3.47). The cued/Bush cell contained the fewest persons saying the article was free of bias. Finally, there was a significant main effect for topic, as expected (H2). Participants thought the articles about parking were freer from bias than those about President Bush or housing (the latter did not differ significantly using the LSD test).

Social Judgment-based Hypotheses. To test the hypothesis (H3) that participants would be more likely to identify statements opposing their own viewpoints as biased, an expectation of each participant’s position was coded as a dummy variable. For the housing stories, students living on campus were assumed to be “pro” and students with cars at school were designated “pro” for the parking issue. For the Bush article, participants were “pro” if they reported more frequently voting for Republicans and “con“ if Democrats. Students who said they voted for both parties about equally were described as ”pro” if they self- described as conservative and “con” if liberal. The fifteen participants who reported voting equally across parties and described themselves as moderate were omitted. As the dependent variable, the number of ”con” paragraphs marked was subtracted from the number of “pro” paragraphs designated as biased. Students assumed to be ”pro” on an issue were more likely to mark “con” paragraphs as biased and vice versa. ”Pro” participants had a mean score of -.057 and “con” participants +.066, a statistically significant difference [t(130) = 2.12, p < .05].

Type of Paragraph Considered Biased. To examine the types of statements readers consider to be biased, a contingency table of paragraphs by the number of times each was marked as biased was

288 JOURNALISM & Mnss COMMLWKATION Q ~ R L Y

at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

TABLE 2 Type of Paragraph by Number of Times Marked as Biased

Type of Paragraph Times Selected Category Subtotal

Factual Content Paragraphs Summary Lead Wrap-up Future Meetings

Summary Paragraphs 1st “Pro” Point 2nd “Pro“ Point 1st “Con” Point 2nd “Con“ Point

Quotations 1st ”Pro” Quote 2nd “Pro“ Quote 1st ”Con” Quote 2nd “Con“ Quote

9 5 3 1

34 10 8 11 5

14 16 15 21

66

Total 109

constructed (see Table 2), yielding a significant value of chi-square

Table 2 shows that factual paragraphs such as the summary lead were selected less frequently than predicted by chance and the quotations more frequently. Indeed, paragraphs were not selected randomly across the three groups [x2 (2) = 44.98, p < .001]. Quotations were significantly more likely to be selected than summary statements [x2 (1) = 8.64, p < .005], and summary statements more frequently than the factual content paragraphs (x2 (1) = 14.53, p < .001).

The paragraph that participants designated as biased most frequently was a quotation offered by a putative opponent of President Bush who said ”He’s increasing defense spending and cutting taxes all over ... he’s spending us back into debt again, just like his father.” This was the second “con” quote in the Bush topic articles. Several respondents wrote comments in the margin objecting to the comparison of George W. BushwithGeorgeH. W. Bush, andsoit ispossible that thisparticular quote might have skewed the results. However, participants designated all of the quotations across all of the topics as biased more frequently than any other statement.

Statistical Power. Power can be described as the ability of a test to distinguish true effects from random noise, that is, the ability to prevent errors of Type 11, in which hypotheses that are true are rejected. All statistical tests require balancing of protection against Type I (false positive) versus Type I1 (false negative) err0rs.2~ The overall ANOVA conducted here with 148 participants, having 134 degrees of freedom,

AN E X P E R M U ~ ~ C ~ L EXAMNATION OFRLUIERS’PERCE~~~ONSOF MEDIA BIAS

[x2(10) = 35.9, p < .001].

289 at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

and assuming a search for effect sizes typically described as small (e.g., effect sizes equivalent to r = .2), has moderate power to distinguish effects from noise. Specifically, the amount of power is .64, meaning that small effects will be distinguished from random variation about two-thirds of the time. Given the magnitude of the calculated power, one possible explanation of the failure of H1 is that the test performed was insufficiently powerful. Another explanation, of course, is that cued and uncued readers perceive equal amounts of bias.

Power issues are more critical when considering the post hoc (LSD) tests used to examine the cued-status by topic interaction, as the t tests between cells only include the participants in the cells being compared and not the entire sample. This had the effect of increasing a to .001, which, combined with the reduction of N to approximately fifty, has the effect of reducing power to approximately 3% (.03). This means that there is less than one chance in thirty of detecting small but real differences between cell means. Inferences based on the conclusion that there are no differences between topic/cued status levels should be made only tentatively.

Discussion A key finding is that perception of bias is negatively associated with the perception of accuracy. This is exactly the mechanism posited by Rouner, Slater, and Buddenbaum.” Combined with the work of Gunther and his associates, these findings suggest a mechanism for the impact of the perception of bias on media use. The perception of bias in a given article is positively related to the perception of the media being biased generallyz5 and also negatively related to accuracy perceptions. Each of these perceptions has the potential to impact users’ perceptions of the credibility of their news sources, and a loss of belief in credibility of a news source renders the source less useful.

Although we deliberately balanced the articles used in this study to the extent possible, the demand characteristics of the experimental situation encouraged participants to view the articles, or at least parts of them, as biased. Half the participants were cued to expect bias, and all of the participants were asked to mark biased statements on a copy of the article. Research participants are volunteers to begin with, and some have a tendency to try and give the researchers the results they are seeking.

Despite the potential for demand characteristics, almost 60% of participants indicated that the article they read was entirely free from bias. This is not dissimilar to the 66% of the public who found media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict or the 57% who believed coverage of the 1996 presidential campaign was fair.27 Further, unsolicited comments included statements such as ”It’s just fine” and “Two quotes from each side ...g ood.” There is cause to be concerned about readers who perceive bias where none really exists, but these readers are a minority.

One in eight participants considered the article they read to be completely biased. This is unanticipated and not predicted or predictable

290 \OURh’ALSM&h‘L4SS COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY

at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

by Social Judgment theory, since these readers are clearly not focusing on individual statements, whether pro, con, or neutral. Many of these people may consider these articles biased because they consider all news media and reports biased.

Although participants in the "cued" condition were more likely to use the term "biased" to describe the article they read, they neither marked more statements as biased nor were they less likely to describe the article they read as entirely free from bias. This finding is consistent with the Watts et al. conclusionzs that public perception of bias is related to charges of bias but not actual bias. Together, their findings and ours suggest another form of cognitive simplification has been brought into play, this one related to the bandwagon effect, in which people simply "go along" with majority position^.^^ Cued persons may not actually find more bias: they may just say they do.

It is clear that additional attention needs to be paid to the nature of the topic-dependence of the hostile media effect. As discussed above, the salience of the topic to the individual is expected to play a role in how the individual processes mediated news reports on the topic. However, this is an inconsistent predictor: this study focused on three topics, two of them highly salient to the student population participants were drawn from, but it was the political topic that showed greatest hostile media effects. Similarly, Vallone, Ross, and Lepper selected participants based on the salience of the topics to the participants and also found inconsistent results.

While findings consistent with Social Judgment theory were replicated, we also replicated findings that users focus their responses on positions different than those they themselves hold. This shows how a reader could look at a story that a trained journalist or ombudsman would say is balanced, and describe it as biased: it is because the readers' responses are focused on material in their latitudes of rejection.

Users are more likely to describe supporting quotations as biased than any other statements. This is not entirely surprising: Journalists use "good" quotations not only for their evidentiary value but also because they may be vivid and colorful, and so attract attention.30 But at the same time these quotations work more directly than other structural elements of a news report in creating perceptions of bias in readers who disagree with them. Ironically, this consequence is created by the words of the people quoted, and not those of the reporter.

Two limitations of this study should be noted. First, although the hostile media effect was replicated, the simple imputation of an attitude, such as being in favor of increased parking on campus, should ideally not be based on a demographic characteristic such as whether the person has a car at school. This is a source of unreliability that should attenuate the magnitude of the relationship between attitude and perception of bias in an opposing statement. Second, the participants in this study were college students, who are unfortunately notoriously low consumers of news media generally. Although they are legally adults and qualified voters, it does not necessarily follow that the cognitive mechanisms underlying their responses to media, particularly political media, are fully developed.

AN EXPEWNW EXAMNATION OF READERS' PERCEPTIONS of MEDM Bw 291 at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

The results of this study, and the other studies of perceived bias, outline the nature of a dilemma facing news media: to do their jobs ethically, journalists must represent all points of view, but presenting all points of view-giving genuinely balanced coverage-opens them to charges of bias from readers who focus only on those elements of the news report with which they disagree.

NOTES

1. Dave D’Alessio and Mike Allen, ”Media Bias in Presidential Elections: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Communication 50 (autumn

2. Frederick Fico, John Clogston, and Gary Pizante, ”Influence of Party and Incumbency on 1984 Michigan Election Coverage,”Journalism Quarterly 65 (winter 1986): 709-13; Barbara F. Luebke, “News About Women on a Wire,” Journalism Quarterly 62 (summer 1985): 329-33; Junetta Davis, ”Sexist Bias in Eight Newspapers,” Journalism Quarterly 59 (autumn 1982): 456-60; Carolyn Martindale, ”Coverage of Black Americans in Five Newspapers Since 1950,” Journalism Quarterly 62 (summer 1985): 321-28; Peter A. Key and Patricia Moy, ”Newspaper Coverage of Fundamentalist Christians, 1980-2000,” Journalism 6 Mass Communication Quarterly 79 (spring 2002): 54-72.

3. GuidoH. StempelII1,”MediaCoverage of Presidentialcampaigns as a Political Issue,“ in The Media in the 1984 and 1988 Presidential Campaigns, ed. Guido H. Stempel I11 and John W. Windhauser (New York Greenwood Press, 1991).

4. Kenneth Dautrich and Jennifer Nucci Dineen, ”Media Bias: What Journalists and the Public Say About It,” Public Perspective 7 (October/ November 1996): 7-14.

5. Paul Waldman and James DeVitt, ”Newspaper Photographs and the 1996 Presidential Election: The Question of Bias,”Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly 75 (summer 1998): 292-301; David Domke, David P. Fan, Michael Fibison, Dhaven V. Shah, Steven S. Smith, and Mark D. Watts, ”News Media, Candidates and Issues, and Public Opinion in the 1996 Presidential Campaign,” Journalism b Mass Communication Quarterly 74 (winter 1997): 718-37.

6. Mark D. Watts, David Domke , Dhaven V. Shah, and David P. Fan, ”Elite Cues and Media Bias in Presidential Elections,” Communication Research 26 (April 1999): 144-75.

7. Robert L. Stevenson and Mark T. Greene, “A Reconsideration of Bias in the News,” Journalism Quarterly 57 (spring 1980): 115-21.

8. Roger Giner-Sorolla and Shelley Chaiken, ”The Causes of Hostile Media Judgments,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 30 (March

9. Muzafer Sherif and Carl I. Hovland, SocialJudgment: Assimilation and Contrast EfJects in Communication and Attitude Change (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961).

10. Robert P. Vallone, Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper, ”The Hostile Media Phenomenon: Biased Perception and Perceptions of Media Bias

2000): 133-56.

1994):165-80.

292 ~OURNAUSM & M A S S COMMlmrICATION QUARTERLY

at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

in Coverage of the Beirut Massacre,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49 (September 1985): 577-85.

11. Sherif and Hovland, Social Judgment, 127-45. 12. Donna Rouner, Michael D. Slater, and Judith M. Buddenbaum,

”How Perceptions of News Bias in News Sources Relate to Beliefs About Media Bias,” Newspaper Research Journal 20 (spring 1999): 41-51.

13. E.g., Shelly Chaiken, ”Heuristic Versus Systematic Information Processing and the Use of Source Versus Message Cues in Persuasion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39 (November 1980): 752-66; Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo, “The Effects of Involvement on Responses to Argument Quantity and Quality: Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion,“ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46 (January 1984): 69-81.

14. Albert C. Gunther, ”Biased Press or Biased Public? Attitudes toward Media Coverage of Social Groups,” Public Opinion Quarterly 56 (summer 1992): 147-67.

15. Albert C. Gunther, Cindy T. Christen, Janice L. Liebhart, and Stella Chih-Yun Chia, “Congenial Public, Contrary Press, and Biased Estimates of the Climate of Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly 65 (summer 2001): 295-320.

16. Albert C. Gunther and Cindy T. Christen, ”Projection or Persuasive Press? Contrary Effects of Personal Opinion and Perceived News Coverage on Estimates of Public Opinion,” Journal of Communication 52 (March 2002): 177-95.

17. Giner-Sorolla and Chaiken, ”The Causes of Hostile Media Judgments,” 176.

18. Gunther and Christen, ”Projection or Persuasive Press?” 184. 19. Rouner, Slater, and Buddenbaum, ”How Perceptions of News

Bias,” 47. 20. Carl I. Hovland, The Order of Presentation in Persuasion (New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957/1966). 21. Participants were presented with a second copy of the article

they had just read and specifically asked, “Now we want you to think back about what you were feeling as you read this article. In particular, we want to know if you thought any or all of the article was biased toward one side or the other. If you thought the article was entirely biased or entirely free from bias, please check the appropriate box on the bottom of the page.

“As you read the article for the first time, if you thought certain parts of the article were biased, please circle them below.”

The article was then repeated. 22. Verling C. Troldahl and Frederic A. Powell, “A Short-Form

Dogmatism Scale for Use in Field Studies,” Social Forces 44 (September

23. Jacob Cohen, Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences,

24. Rouner, Slater, and Buddenbaum, ”How Perceptions of News

25. Gunther et al., ”Congenial Public,” 306-307. 26. Vallone, Ross, and Lepper, ”The Hostile Media Phenomenon,”

1966): 211-5.

rev. ed. (New York: Academic Press 1977).

Bias,“ 42-3.

AN EXPERIMWW EXAMINATION OF RUDW’PERCEFTONS OF MEDIA BIAS 293 at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from

578. 27. Dautrich and Dineen, "Media Bias," 13. 28. Watts et al., "Elite Cues," 166. 29. Stan A. Kaplowitz, Edward L. Fink, Dave D'Alessio, and G.

Blake Armstrong, "Anonymity, Strength of Attitude, and the Influence of Public Opinion Polls," Human Communication Research 10 (fall 1983):

30. Fred Fedler, John R. Bender, Lucinda Davenport, and Paul E. Kostyu, Reportingfor tkeMedia, 6th ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1997).

5-25.

at COLUMBIA UNIV on May 30, 2013jmq.sagepub.comDownloaded from