We have known about media bias effect for decades: the belief that the media is biased against your side of a debate. New research finds that the same belief applies to misinformation. While the research was focused on political issues, the underlying cause applies equally to misinformation about brands, companies, and business issues. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel find that the PR industry has not yet acknowledged the phenomenon, which requires strategies to address it.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson:
Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 519. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz:
And I’m Shel Holtz. When you think about all the misinformation out there—fake news, bad-faith spin—do you think it’s mostly aimed at your side of an argument or the other side? Most of us, if we’re honest, feel like it’s aimed at us. And there’s now research saying that feeling is nearly universal.

Even though the research was based on political discourse, it has a direct connection to organizational communication. We’ll explain right after this.

All right, let’s start by backing up for a second. There’s a concept called the hostile media effect. It’s been around since the 1980s. The original study showed pro-Israeli and pro-Arab students the exact same news coverage of the exact same event. Both groups walked away convinced it was biased against their side.

Everyone saw exactly the same footage, but they reached opposite conclusions. And the more committed you were, the more certain you were that the media was out to get you.

That finding has held up for 40 years, and it’s a big reason trust in news has collapsed as politics has gotten more tribal.

Now let’s add the new wrinkle. A team at the University of Amsterdam asked whether that same instinct applies to misinformation—to fake news. They surveyed 4,000 people across Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland around the 2024 European elections.

Nearly half said their preferred party was particularly targeted by misinformation. Ask about the party they liked least, and that number got cut in half. They’re calling it the hostile misinformation effect, and it got stronger the more politically engaged people were. The more plugged in people felt, the more victimized they felt.

Now, Neville, you might think that’s a political science finding. But the mechanism underneath isn’t about politics; it’s about identity and motivated reasoning. Every brand, every company, every department is an identity group.

Your most loyal customers are partisans. Your most engaged employees are partisans. The research says the people most attached to your organization are exactly the ones primed to believe any criticism out there is unfairly targeting them.

Now think about a crisis. Your defenders don’t need convincing that your critics are unfair. They already assume it. The minds still open are the uncommitted people in the middle.

Among neutrals, knowing more made them see less bias. It’s only partisans who dig in.

So if someone criticizes a brand that some people love, the brand’s biggest fans may see that as an attack rather than just an honest review—and respond in kind. There was no crisis, but now maybe there is.

There’s an internal angle here, too. Picture a layoff memo or a return-to-office announcement. Leadership reads it as fair. But every faction inside the company—by department, by level, by tenure—is wired to read the same message as unfair to them.

“We said it neutrally” is no defense because neutrality is in the eye of the beholder.

This notion reveals a trap for communicators. When bad coverage hits, it’s tempting to wave it away as misinformation. But “fake news” self-destructed as a term the moment it got weaponized to mean “any story I don’t like.”

Cry misinformation every time you’re criticized, and you train your audience to tune out the label. You also look evasive to the exact neutrals you need to reach.

So this is where I want to bring you in, Neville. We’ve spent years on this show talking about declining trust and the misinformation environment. This research says the problem isn’t just that there’s more bad information out there; it’s that people are wired to feel personally besieged by it.

And I’m not sure our profession has reckoned with what that means.

Neville Hobson:
Yeah, it doesn’t sound like it, Shel. I don’t think so.

It’s actually quite fascinating looking at the Nieman Lab article you shared with me in our Slack channel and seeing the depth of the research on a topic that I had no idea was even a thing to look into.

I found it interesting in a number of areas.

For instance, the study you quoted from the 2024 European Parliament elections got me thinking. The tendency to see misinformation as directed at you seems more pronounced the farther right politically someone is.

That caught my attention because isn’t that precisely what we’re seeing in the United States with the Trump MAGA movement?

Here in the UK, we’ve got Reform and an even newer party that’s emerged further to the right. Those groups often function as an echo chamber for the kinds of messages Trump promotes. They’re constantly criticizing anything anyone else says as an attack and talking about issues in ways that rile people up and stimulate hostile reactions in return.

We see a lot of that in this country right now.

It’s interesting that this study has been done, and I think the way you’re connecting it to organizational communication is a good call. It certainly gives us a lot to think about.

One question it prompted in my mind concerns the point about engagement and partisanship. If the more engaged and partisan someone is, the stronger this effect becomes, does that mean an organization’s most loyal stakeholders are actually its most vulnerable to this kind of perception?

What do you think?

Shel Holtz:
Absolutely. I think that’s exactly the connection we can draw between this study and organizational communication.

If somebody criticizes the company based on an experience they had—and let’s say that criticism goes viral—and it was sincere and well-intentioned, then the partisan defenders of that organization are going to feel attacked. They’re likely to respond in kind and escalate a situation that probably would have faded into the background if left alone.

I think that’s one of the fallouts organizations can experience from this phenomenon. The more partisan you are, the more besieged you’re going to feel when you perceive something being said about the brand or organization as unfair—even if it was perfectly fair.

Neville Hobson:
So how do you address that within the organization?

Shel Holtz:
That’s an interesting question, and it’s hard to fight because you really can’t argue people out of it.

One related concept is the third-person effect—the idea that other people are more susceptible to media influence than we are ourselves.

In other words: I can see what the media is trying to do, but other people are going to be fooled by it.

When you stack that together with the idea that your group is being unfairly targeted, you get a complete worldview: I’m clear-eyed, my group is the victim, and everyone else is gullible.

There was a fascinating study where researchers took 661 Coca-Cola drinkers and showed them a real fake-news story—a 2016 hoax claiming that Dasani water was being recalled because parasites had been found in it.

The finding was that the people most confident in their own ability to spot fake news were the most convinced that other people would be fooled by it. They were also the ones most loudly demanding that Coca-Cola take corrective action.

Sometimes the stakeholders who are screaming “Do something about misinformation!” aren’t reacting to the actual threat. They’re reacting to a belief that other, less discerning people are being duped.

That makes the challenge even more complicated for communicators.

Neville Hobson:
Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it?

The next question that comes to mind is this: If both sides feel targeted regardless of what’s actually out there, what should communicators do? Is there an approach that works when perception is this detached from reality?

Shel Holtz:
From an organizational standpoint—and I’m less interested in the political implications for purposes of this podcast—I think there are a couple of things.

First, the more prebunking you can do, the better.

When one of these situations comes up—a bad review, criticism from the media, negative reporting—you can immediately point people to information you’ve already published that addresses the issue. Having a bank of credible material you can reference may keep people from getting unnecessarily riled up.

The other thing is to respond quickly, but not emotionally.

If you can maintain a sense of calm—or even a sense of humor—you increase the likelihood that others will follow suit.

If people see that the company isn’t feeling besieged and isn’t acting attacked, that may help tamp down some of the reaction.

Neville Hobson:
So this becomes a major issue for trust, doesn’t it?

And I imagine the role of artificial intelligence in all of this only exacerbates the problem. Is that how you see it?

Shel Holtz:
Yeah, I do.

The flood of AI-generated slop out there—content targeting your organization, your brand, or your leaders—is only going to increase exponentially.

If somebody has an axe to grind and wants to flood search engines or AI summaries with negative content, AI makes that dramatically easier.

Now, to be fair, the research we’re discussing focused on information published through media outlets. That may be an important distinction.

People might be more skeptical of something posted on a blog or LinkedIn than something published by a mainstream news outlet.

That’s where this research suggests people feel especially attacked.

Neville Hobson:
That was my thought as well.

Going back to the study, we’re looking at this from a political perspective. We all consume information online, and most of us have preferred sources.

Meanwhile, mainstream media is going through what seems like a growing crisis of trust.

You see constant battles online between people citing one newspaper versus another. It’s distracting, and it wastes an enormous amount of time and energy.

It also got me thinking about how I react to some of this. The suggestion that people on the political right are more susceptible to this phenomenon doesn’t really describe me. I’m more in the middle.

I don’t react the way I see some people reacting—especially on that delightful conversation platform known as X.

People vent their spleens there. Maybe it makes them feel better, but I don’t think it advances understanding in any meaningful way.

Then again, perhaps that’s not the point.

The point seems to be: I win, you lose.

And that’s very much the Trump approach. It feels like that’s where much of this is headed.

Shel Holtz:
Yeah.

One of the stranger findings from the research was that when researchers examined whether people felt more victimized after their party lost an election, the results weren’t what you’d expect.

You’d think the losers would feel most targeted.

Instead, the people whose party won were more likely to believe their side was being targeted by misinformation.

Feeling besieged isn’t necessarily about being under threat. It’s about identity.

And since you mentioned X, there’s another interesting strand of research.

People may dismiss something because they saw it on X. But researchers found that the source of a message can trigger hostile media perceptions independently of the content itself.

Your company’s name on a statement can be enough to act as a bias cue for people who already have feelings about you.

The exact same words can land very differently depending on whose logo appears at the top.

That’s worth thinking about because it means message discipline alone can’t solve a credibility problem.

Neville Hobson:
This is a bigger dilemma than it might seem at first. A real conundrum for communicators.

The Nieman Lab article is lengthy, but it’s definitely worth reading.

Shel Holtz:
Yeah. And there will be links in the show notes to some of the original research on identity bias as well.

The reason I chose this topic is that I’ve never heard it discussed in PR circles. I’ve never seen it covered in PR textbooks or books about public relations.

This was completely new to me.

That’s one reason I’m still struggling with an answer about how to deal with it.

But it certainly starts with recognizing that it’s happening.

Neville Hobson:
I agree. It was new to me as well.

The more I think about it, though, the more it seems to describe the environment we’re operating in today.

Now we just have to figure out what to do about it.

Shel Holtz:
Yes, we do.

And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #519: Is Misinformation Biased Against You? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.