?Wir sind besser als die anderen??

The paper applies social psychology??s results on the theory of social comparison to media content. The finding that people tend to evaluate themselves better than they evaluate others, even if there is no foundation for that in reality, presents the starting point of these considerations. Such an optimistic bias can also be observed in social groups. It is established and distributed in small groups by interpersonal communication and contributes to the individuals?? identification with the group and, thus, to the group??s stability. The paper argues that this phenomenon should be applicable to larger social groups such as religious and ethnic groups or social strata. In these cases, the optimistic bias would have to be communicatively distributed through the media. We introduce a theoretical model that combines the role of media content, its individual reception and processing, and the reciprocal effect of processing on social structure. Subsequently, first empirical evidence of optimistic-bias presentations in media discourses is presented, and resulting problems for future research are discussed.