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Like any other form of bias, it both affects how people interpret events and is affected by events themselves. Compare to political partisanship: the public's interpretation of political scandals (of varying levels of real or fake) is obviously enormously affected by both their personal political views and the political views of the media sources and social circles they trust. You can probably think of plenty of cases where very similar actions have been interpreted differently by partisans and biased organizations depending on which party they're associated with. At the same time it's not completely detached from reality, not everyone is maximally partisan so there really are actions you can take to make your political party more or less popular.
That doesn't mean being generically "likable" is the best strategy either, you can also do things like decrease the influence of your political enemies or do things that have a real-world impact that people like even if they don't like the policy in abstract. If Trump successfully changed the political leanings of mainstream media institutions, or Israel successfully helped the Iranian protestors take over the government, then that would help their popularity more than it pissed people off so long as it didn't require doing anything really unpopular like mass-arresting journalists or using nuclear weapons. Conversely if Israel made all palestinians citizens that would make the population of Israel a lot more anti-jewish despite it being "likable". Anti-white bias has had a recent surge in influence via the growth of the social-justice movement despite sustaining itself on stuff like "police are allowed to defend themselves and sometimes make mistakes" and "the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till", sometimes an influential ideology really does hate you enough that you'll make more progress by trying to fight that ideology than by playing nice. Anti-Israel bias isn't as detached from their recent actions, at least not in the west, but it's a reminder that determining the net impact of an action long-term is more complicated than checking popularity polls.
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