But not all bias accusations are the same: some bias accusations point to actual bias, and other bias accusations are motivated by people’s political ideas. Until now, however, academic research has not really looked at the difference between these two types of bias accusations.

Bias accusations

To test this, our study asked: when people hear bias accusations toward PSM, does it affect how they perceive that news? And does it matter if the news is actually biased or not, and does someone’s political leaning affect this? We tested this with an experiment among more than 1600 participants. People who joined the experiment saw either a pro-environmental interests, balanced or pro-farmers interests NOS (Dutch public broadcaster) news article about the nitrogen crisis, together with a bias accusation or not. The control group saw balanced news without a bias accusations.

And what did we find?

Here’s what we found: when news was in fact biased, bias accusations did not really matter. Actually, respondents recognized the bias itself, irrespective of the presence of a bias accusation. Overall, they were good at recognizing bias in the right direction, and when the content did not match their views, they were more likely to view it as biased. But for balanced news, bias accusation did in fact increase bias perceptions, particularly among strong identifiers. Put differently, even when news content is neutral, public expressions of bias accusations impacts how audiences respond to it. We also found that political orientation mattered. Right-leaning and farmers-supportive respondents were more likely to see bias. This suggests that PSM might be slightly politized to the right.

Accusations have effect

Why do we care about these findings? Well, first of all, people do not always rely on external cues, but overall, recognize bias when it is present. At the same time, when news is not biased, accusations do have an effect. This means that, especially in day-to-day situations, the politicization of PSM through public discourse in fact influences bias perceptions, which may undermine their credibility. Lastly, in this study, we anonymized the identity of the accuser, making our estimations likely conservative. Politicization may arguably be even stronger when accusations are expressed by public- and political elites.  

No uniform effects

Our research helps us understand that bias accusations do not have uniform effects. In fact, the accuracy of accusations and audiences’ political viewpoints matter. On the one hand, PSM legitimacy is sensitive to politicization through unfounded bias accusations. On the other hand, audiences are not powerless, and demonstrate media literacy capabilities.