Do Hostile Media Perceptions Constrain Minipublics? A Study of How Oregon Voters Perceive Citizens' Statements

The deliberative quality of a minipublic often depends on its ability to inform the opinions of a larger public. The Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) aims to do so by producing a Citizens’ Statement, which we conceptualize as a deliberative form of mass media. Like any mass media, this Statement can only influence public opinion to the extent that citizens consider it unbiased and credible. Hostile media perceptions often prevent favorable evaluations of media content, but no prior work has considered whether these perceptions could undermine the output of deliberative minipublics. To examine that possibility, we analyze online survey data on Oregon voters’ assessments of two 2014 Citizens’ Statements. Results showed that voters’ evaluations of the Statements were unaffected by hostile media perceptions. Assessments were more favorable when voters had confidence in their knowledge of the CIR’s design, process, and participants. Evaluations also were more favorable for those voters with greater faith in deliberation’s capacity to render considered judgments. We elaborate on these findings in our discussion section and consider their theoretical and practical implications for implementing minipublics and bolstering their deliberative quality.

Algorithmic or Human Source? Examining Relative Hostile Media Effect With a Transformer-Based Framework

The relative hostile media effect suggests that partisans tend to perceive the bias of slanted news differently depending on whether the news is slanted in favor of or against their sides. To explore the effect of an algorithmic vs. human source on hostile media perceptions, this study conducts a 3 (author attribution: human, algorithm, or human-assisted algorithm) x 3 (news attitude: pro-issue, neutral, or anti-issue) mixed factorial design online experiment (<em>N</em> = 511). This study uses a transformer-based adversarial network to auto-generate comparable news headlines. The framework was trained with a dataset of 364,986 news stories from 22 mainstream media outlets. The results show that the relative hostile media effect occurs when people read news headlines attributed to all types of authors. News attributed to a sole human source is perceived as more credible than news attributed to two algorithm-related sources. For anti-Trump news headlines, there exists an interaction effect between author attribution and issue partisanship while controlling for people’s prior belief in machine heuristics. The difference of hostile media perceptions between the two partisan groups was relatively larger in anti-Trump news headlines compared with pro-Trump news headlines.

Social media users (under)appreciate the news: An application of hostile media bias to news disseminated on Facebook

News outlets rely on social media to freely distribute content, offering a venue for users to comment on news. This exposes individuals to user comments prior to reading news articles, which can influence perceptions of news content. A 2 × 2 between-subject experiment (N = 690) tested the hostile media bias theory via the influence of comments seen before viewing a news story on perceptions of bias and credibility. Results show that user comments induce hostile media perceptions.

Facebook News Sharing, Hostile Perceptions of News Content, and Political Participation

This study explored Facebook users’ hostile perceptions of shared news content and its relationship with their political participation. This study conducted an online experiment with a 3 (news slant: pro-attitudinal, neutral, counter-attitudinal) × 3 (news sharer: in-group, neutral, out-group) between-subjects design. This experiment was administered in the context of the abortion issue in South Korea. Consistent with the hostile media effect, the news slant (pro-attitudinal, counter-attitudinal) of shared news content was found to influence Facebook users’ hostile perceptions of shared news content. Out-group sharers also significantly affected their hostile perceptions of shared news content. However, in-group sharers did not. Furthermore, the effect of Facebook users’ hostile perceptions of shared news content on their willingness for political participation was moderated by their prior minority perception in the general society. Only for Facebook users with high levels of prior minority perception in the general society, their hostile perceptions of shared news content appeared to encourage their political engagement. The implications of these findings were discussed.