The Hostile Media Effect: Israel, Palestine & Beyond

Throughout the last 10 years I’ve wondered how people on both sides of an issue can perceive the media as biased against them. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a perfect example. Those of my friends who identify as pro-Israel firmly believe that the “mainstream” media is completely, obviously and shamelessly pro-Palestinian, through and through. This would include most news sources, both local Australian ones and international ones. The more strong they are in their pro-Israel political convictions the more strongly they seem to perceive this media bias. Furthermore, they think all reports to do with the conflict are soaked in this bias, so it permeates any type of story about Israel or Palestine.

And of course the converse is true. Those of my friends who identify as pro-Palestinian firmly believe that the “mainstream” media is completely, obviously and shamelessly pro-Israel, through and through. This would include most news sources, both local Australian ones and international ones. The more strong they are in their pro-Palestinian political convictions the more strongly they seem to perceive this media bias. Furthermore, they think all reports to do with the conflict are soaked in this bias, so it permeates any type of story about Israel or Palestine.

Whenever I have heard it from either end, I used to get bewildered at how “obvious” both sides claimed the bias to be. This must be some inherent bias in how we see the world, I thought. It was the only way to make sense of it. I’ve seen this in other debates as well but nowhere was it more “obvious” to me than about Israel and Palestine.

A short while ago, I stumbled on something that supports this. At least tentatively. In psychology, there is something known as the hostile media effect, whereby people tend to inherently perceive a media that is not explicitly allied with their viewpoint (or the opposite) as being hostile. And the study cited in the Wikipedia article is — surprise surprise — about Israel and Palestine. And here’s the scary thing — this bias is not just about the tone of the news pieces but about seemingly objective things like counting positive/negative references:

[P]ro-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 Palestinian refugees by Christian Lebanese militia fighters 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.

Of course there might be some problems with this particular experiment but there seem to have been similar kinds of results amongs supporters of different US presidential candidates and different sides in the Bosnian conflict.

Two conclusions from this. Firstly, be wary of the self-serving nature of believing that the “majority” of media outlets are biased against your position. Secondly, as usual when looking at cognitive biases, we are absolutely doomed as a species.