The Psychological Price of Media Bias

Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 2022

The Media Bias Effect (MBE) represents the biasing influence of the nonverbal behavior of a TV interviewer on viewers' impressions of the interviewee. In the MBE experiment, participants view a 4-min made-up political interview in which they are exposed only to the nonverbal behavior of the actors. The interviewer is friendly toward the politician in one experimental condition and hostile in the other. The interviewee was a confederate filmed in the same studio, and his clips are identical in the two conditions. This experiment was used successfully in a series of studies in several countries (Babad and

International Journal of Law, Government and Communication

In the context of today’s media realities which is influenced by rich access to news and information from various media sources, many viewers are unaware that media often constructed its content to persuade individuals of a certain intended message. However, recent years have seen the declining trust towards the media, which contributes to public belief that media has no longer adhere to its traditional media ethics. This study aims to investigate the biases and persuasion strategies as utilised in media interviews. Investigation on the interpersonal meanings articulated by the interactants was carried out based on their Mood choices. The data were obtained from two transcriptions of television interviews on the death of Muammar Gaddafi. Questions which were employed using the WH- interrogatives was found to be more superior in subjects which are linked to the death of the said figure. This finding highlights the use of Mood choices by the interviewers as they wish to reduce the pre...

Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2007

The current research investigated whether bias exists in newspapers that are considered liberal or conservative, and whether this bias influences public opinion of events. Participants were college students (N = 67) who were enrolled in a 4-year university (n = 33) or a community college (n = 34). Participants were shown photographs and short articles relating to a presidential debate between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry. Participants completed questionnaires relating to their opinions of the candidates. Results showed statistical significance within groups before and after exposure to the newspaper clippings.

International Journal of Communication, 2013

Americans' confidence in news is at an all-time low, and many are turning to entertaining programming, such as cable-talk programs like Hannity or political-satire programs like The Daily Show. These programs regularly feature interviews with public officials, potential candidates, and celebrities. In this new hybrid news-entertainment environment, what are the effects on citizens' perceptions of media bias and its effects on themselves, as well as others? This study, combined with results from a qualitative analysis (Baym, this special section), demonstrates that different program brands have different effects on perceptions of bias and effects. Respondents were randomly assigned to view an interview with a potential 2012 presidential candidate, and results demonstrated significant differences among them in perceived bias toward the candidate. Perceptions of the candidate, the host, and the program's makers also differed significantly across the program conditions. Implications for media effects research are discussed.

Journalism Studies, 2013

Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 2010

Previous research demonstrated that viewers' judgments of an interviewee are influenced by the nonverbal behavior of the interviewer. In studies of this media bias effect, judges view a short political interview with a friendly or a hostile interviewer, and then rate their ...

Abstract Media literacy education programs are intended to educate students about how media are constructed and how they influence attitudes and behavior. This paper examines whether media-educated students are less susceptible to a nonverbal media bias effect. Operationally, a nonverbal media bias effect occurs when people judge an interviewee more negatively when the interviewer's nonverbal behavior toward him is hostile rather than friendly.

It is hard to describe how strong most people feel about the favoritism of the media towards certain political par-ties, events and people. Our world is not short of anecdotal accounts of how this or that media outlet demonstrate favoritism and perhaps reports the so called "truth". But what is the truth? Media outlets are packed with what we call "spin"—a type of propaganda used to sway public opinion in favor or against an organization or public figure. So an obvious question arises: Can this favoritism be quanti-fied? Many of the works published on media bias look at historical reasons for the media to take sides. One clear ex-ample of favoritism happens in politics; the Pew Research Center has shown that different media outlets attract audiences with different political ideology, which in turn can put pressure on outlets to satisfy what they want to hear leading to spinning the news: a typical vicious cycle. This paper proposes a mechanism to quantify media b...

2007