"Fair and Balanced" Perceptions of TV News Coverage?
The operation of source-credibility effects — roughly, that I may believe something if X says it but discount it if it comes instead from Y — is well established in social psychological research on attitude formation and change. But here’s an interesting new twist, in the context of current controversies over “fair and balanced” political coverage by the media.
In a study reported in the latest issue of Political Behavior (abstract here), Joel Turner notes that many Americans perceive TV news coverage as ideologically biased. As cases in point, Turner singles out the widespread sense that the Fox News Channel tilts to the right while CNN leans left.
Studies of bias in reporting of the news typically “content analyze” news reports from various media outlets to determine whether they are presenting more or less the same picture of current events. The bias hypothesis is sustained to the extent that such content is found to vary across outlets.
Turner took a different tack. He deliberately held content constant and looked for another type of bias — bias among TV viewers based not on what they were seeing and hearing, but on the channel they (thought they) were watching.
To check out this possibility, Turner conducted a simple experiment. He selected five stories from Fox and CNN and told his experimental subjects (predictably, college undergraduates) that they had aired on either Fox or CNN; he also played these stories for a control group that was told nothing about their source. The subjects in each group then scored the ads in terms of their ideological bias.
The results? The stories that Turner attributed to CNN were perceived as significantly more liberal than those that received no network attribution. By contrast, when Turner attributed the very same stories to Fox News, they were seen as significantly more conservative than their unattributed counterparts. These source-based perceptual biases were especially pronounced among viewers who didn’t share the putative ideological perspective of the network they thought they were watching. That is, conservatives watching CNN were more likely to perceive liberal bias than were moderates or liberals, and liberals watching Fox were more likely to perceive conservative bias than were moderates or conservatives — again, in the very same stories.
None of this means that allegations of biased coverage are incorrect, of course. It does, however, suggest that such bias exists, to a significant degree, in the eye of the viewer rather than, or in addition to, in the contents of the news stories themselves.
Comments
I don’t doubt the findings, or their implications, but another way to frame this is that people are skeptical of biased news sources. This is very valid when you consider that news outlets also skew their coverage by their selection of stories. I’ve been watching the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of global warming and their preferred method of bias is by simply not reporting any story that conflicts with their left wing party line and in incorporating gratuitous, and unsubstantiated, comments in stories not specifically about global warming. Suspecting the source, not just looking for bias in individual stories, is a valid way to deal with this.
Posted by: Robert L. | January 5, 2008 01:21 PM
The other question here is whether the idea of the bias is real or simply generated by continual innuendo by a truly biased entity. CNN seems to me a good example, while CNN is not Fox, it is also generally left/liberal either. The perception was created by the continual cries of supposed bias from the right-wing media, especially pre-Fox News
Posted by: BillCinSD | January 7, 2008 10:09 PM
Even more than that, people tend to think in terms of poles. So if Fox is right, then CNN must be left.
Unfortunately, Fox might be a 10 and CNN a 6 (where 5 is neutral) but people will, I think, percieve that Fox is a 7 and CNN is a 3.
Posted by: Chuck | January 9, 2008 05:59 PM