Why Can Opposing Sides Both See the Same Report as Biased Against Them?

Two people on opposing sides of an issue can read the same report and each conclude that it is obviously helping the other side. This does not require either reader to be deliberately distorting the material. Psychologists call the tendency the hostile media effect: people who are strongly involved in an issue may judge identical news content as unfavourable to their own side.

In a classic 1985 study, American students with pro-Israeli or pro-Arab views watched the same television coverage of the Beirut massacre. Both groups saw the coverage as biased towards the opposing side and differed systematically in judgements such as how much unfavourable material it contained. The researchers proposed that prior commitments affect which passages people notice and remember, how they interpret the same statement and how they expect neutral viewers to be influenced. A later meta-analysis of 34 studies found an overall effect, alongside substantial variation between studies.

This effect does not prove that news coverage is actually neutral. Media can contain genuine bias in story selection, headlines, wording, source distribution or factual accuracy, and audiences can identify it reasonably. The finding is narrower: a strong feeling that “our side is being targeted” is not complete evidence of bias. A more reliable assessment separates identity from content long enough to check which facts were included or omitted, whether the same standards were applied to both sides, and whether primary material supports the conclusions. The research describes an average tendency, not a diagnosis of any reader or a reason to dismiss a specific criticism.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4045697/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08824096.2011.565280
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/9/4/211504/96654/