Hostile media effect: A literature review

The hostile media effect was first studied by (Vallone et al., 1985) who demonstrated that partisans are prone to perceive ostensibly neutral media coverage as unfairly biased against their position, regardless of which partisan group they belong to. This thesis is a bibliographic review that investigates how the literature has developed since then, discussing the various replications, theoretical models and variables that have been associated with the effect, the interaction with other closely related effects, as well as expansions in the scope of the effect itself, to both non neutral media, and non-news-media media. Themes and theoretical connections are discussed. Particular attention is given to potential explanations for the effect, based on commonalities between predictive variables that have been studied, specifically the reason for the American Republican party’s higher perception of hostile media.