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This tendency has been verified in a number of experiments.

In one study by Robert Vallone , Lee Ross and Mark Lepper, pro- Palestinian students and pro- Israeli students at Stanford University were shown the same news filmstrips pertaining to the then-recent Sabra and Shatila massacre of Arab refugees in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. On a number of objective measures, both sides found that these identical news clips were slanted in favor of the other side. Pro-Israeli students reported seeing more anti-Israel references and fewer favorable references to Israel in the news report and pro-Palestinian students reported seeing more anti-Palestinian references, and so on. Both sides said a neutral observer would have a more negative view of their side from viewing the clips, and that the media would have excused the other side where it blamed their side.

It is important not that the two sides disagreed on subjective generalizations about the media coverage as a whole, such as what might be expressed as "I thought that the news has been generally biased against this side of the issue." Instead, controlling for the same news clips, subjects differed along partisan lines on simple, objective criteria such as the number of references to a given subject. As such, the hostile media effect is not just a difference of opinion but a difference of perception.

This effect is interesting to psychologists because it appears to be a reversal of the otherwise pervasive effects of confirmation bias: in this area, people seem to pay more attention to information that contradicts rather than what supports their pre-existing views. More recently, theorists have begun using the term disconfirmation bias to explain this kind of effect.

Studies have found hostile media effects related to other political conflicts, including strife in Bosnia and in U.S. presidential electionThe United States presidential elections determine who becomes the President of the United States. For the current U. election see U. presidential election, 2004 How elections are administered The election of the United States President is governed by Secs.

1 See also

Psychology:

• cognitive biasCognitive bias is any of a wide range of observer effects identified in cognitive science, including very basic statistical and memory errors that are common to all human beings (first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman) and drastically skew t
• self-serving biasSelf-serving bias occurs when people are more likely to claim responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests. Dale Miller and Michea
• selective perceptionSelective perception may refer to any number of cognitive biases in psychology related to the way expectations affect perception. For instance, several studies have shown that students who were told they were consuming alcoholic beverages (which in fact w
• list of cognitive biasesCognitive bias is distortion in the way we perceive reality (see also cognitive distortion). Some of these have been verified empirically in the field of psychology, others are considered general categories of bias. anchoring anthropic bias attribution, a

Media:

• media biasLiberal bias and conservative bias should both be merged and redirected to this article. Media bias is a real or perceived tendency of journalists and news producers within the mass media to approach both the presentation of particular stories, and the se
• liberal biasLiberal bias and conservative bias should both be merged and redirected to Media bias. Liberal bias " or liberal media " in American political discourse, are common phrases used, mostly by those on the political right, to explain their view that the Ameri
• conservative biasLiberal bias and conservative bias should both be merged and redirected to Media bias. Conservative bias is the mirror image of liberal bias, a belief that the media is biased in favor of conservative views. Rarely spoken of directly, liberals tend to ref
• Media coverage of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict