Interest in the meaningful sides of media entertainment has blossomed over the last decade, with numerous scholars examining how certain media content can enhance social good and well-being. Because social scientific work in this area is relatively new and is rapidly evolving, numerous conceptualizations of meaningful media experiences have been introduced. In this paper we argue for the importance of recognizing a unique form of media experience that causes us to look beyond our own concerns, to recognize moral beauty, and to feel unity with humanity and nature—what we label here as “self-transcendent media experiences.”

This study examined the interaction among different news sources, individual levels of partisanship, and the hostile media effect in sports news. Two hundred and three participants read a balanced story about their home-town college football team in one of three newspapers: the home-town, the cross-state rival university's town, or a neutral-town paper. The study found differences in the hostile media effect across conditions, suggesting the importance of news source in the phenomenon. Further, findings indicate strong support for the hostile media effect among sports news consumers.

This study employed a cognitive psychological approach to examining a little studied phenomenon – university image – among two groups of evaluators. The study found that different groups used different criteria when rating ten major US universities. Found to significantly predict the image of the universities among a sample of current university students were three factors: academic factors, athletic factors, and the extent of news coverage of the university. Found to significantly predict the image of the same universities among an adult, non‐student sample were four factors: a combined factor including all university attributes (including academic and athletic); the extent of news coverage; the education level of respondents; and the respondents’ level of sports fanship. Recent research in attitude structure is used to explain how different image criteria are recalled and employed by the different groups.