Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows
Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post skewed coverage toward Israeli narratives, according to a quantitative analysis.
The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza showed a consistent bias against Palestinians, according to an Intercept analysis of major media coverage.
The print media outlets, which play an influential role in shaping U.S. views of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, paid little attention to the unprecedented impact of Israel’s siege and bombing campaign on both children and journalists in the Gaza Strip.
Major U.S. newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7. Pro-Palestinian activists have accused major publications of pro-Israel bias, with the New York Times seeing protests Opens in a new tabat its headquarters in Manhattan for its coverage of Gaza –– an accusation supported by our analysis.
WELL NO DUH. Is this really something people didn't know? The media as a whole is incredibly slanted towards Israel. The fact that none are calling out the genocide that's happening is a big fucking clue.
This is an excellent and enlightening article. Though I already knew that MSM was highly biased on this conflict it is somewhat startling to see just how biased it really is.
Honestly, CNN isn't doing so badly being impartial. I just gave someone an embolysm I'm sure by reading that, but for real, they're not editorializing and they're showing nothing but human suffering in Gaza as well as official Israeli statements and footage of the music festival attack by Hamas.
Why will they care, Palestinians are a touch brown, you can’t make money off them, and they are muslims? No thanks /s
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The print media outlets, which play an influential role in shaping U.S. views of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, paid little attention to the unprecedented impact of Israel’s siege and bombing campaign on both children and journalists in the Gaza Strip.
The open-source analysis focuses on the first six weeks of the conflict, from the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that killed 1,139 Israelis and foreign workers to November 24, the beginning of the weeklong “humanitarian truce” agreed to by both parties to facilitate hostage exchanges.
The stakes for this routine devaluing of Palestinian lives couldn’t be higher: As the death toll in Gaza mounts, entire cities are leveled and rendered uninhabitable for years, and whole family lines are wiped out, the U.S. government has enormous influence as Israel’s primary patron and weapons supplier.
In a notable exception, the New York Times ran a late-November front-page story on the historic pace of killings of Palestinian women and children, though the headline featured neither group.
On October 13, the Los Angeles Times ran an Associated Press report that said, “The Gaza Health Ministry said Friday that 1,799 people have been killed in the territory, including more than 580 under the age of 18 and 351 women.
Despite this asymmetry, polls show shifting sympathy toward Palestinians and away from Israel among Democrats, with massive generational splits driven, in part, by a stark difference in news sources.
The original article contains 1,783 words, the summary contains 231 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The open-source analysis focuses on the first six weeks of the conflict, from the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that killed 1,139 Israelis and foreign workers to November 24, the beginning of the weeklong “humanitarian truce” agreed to by both parties to facilitate hostage exchanges. During this period, 14,800 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children, were killed by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Today, the Palestinian death toll is over 22,000.
This paragraph mentions Palestinian deaths three times but Israeli deaths once. Therefore the Intercept is biased, according to the Intercept.
I suggest you read the articles, they have graphs and stuff.
I did read the article. I think the methods are questionable. Making a graph doesn't mean the methods are sound.
For example:
For every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times — or a rate 16 times more per death that of Palestinians.
In other words "There have been 20000 Palestinian deaths and 1000 Israeli deaths" is considered biased, and that sentence should have used the word "Palestinian" twenty times because there were twenty times as many deaths.
Consider how time works. Every article about bombings in Gaza also includes references back to October 7th in giving background information. Thousands of articles in the immediate aftermath of a 9/11 scale event didn't mention a Palestinian death toll because there weren't even numbers available.
Some of the "quantitative" techniques used in this article are downright stupid. Dividing word counts for "Israel" and "Palestine" by the number of deaths in each region? Expecting no drop off in reporting over a six week period? Expecting article counts to scale linearly with reported death counts?
They've measured interest, not bias.
Not at all. This article confirms other research such as from three months ago by Holly Jackson:
"
The New York Times has consistently mentioned Israeli deaths more often than Palestinian deaths overall from 10/7 to 10/22. Israeli deaths have been mentioned the most on 10/12 and 10/13, even though Israeli deaths plateaued since 10/12 and Palestinian deaths have skyrocketed.
Coverage of Israeli deaths increased as Palestinian deaths began to skyrocket.
In addition to the bias in sheer volume of coverage, there was a huge difference in the language used. The word “slaughter” was used 53 times in these articles since 10/7 to describe the deaths of Israelis and zero times to describe the death of Palestinians. The word “massacre” shows up 24 times in reference to Israelis and once in reference to Palestinians in the tagged sentences.
The articles rarely mention the names of Palestinians who die — instead using terms like “mourner”, “resident”, “assailant” or “militant”.
In one article, a murdered Palestinian was simply referred to as the “bloodied corpse” of a presumed "terrorist". This is still counted as a mention of a Palestinian death in the data despite the framing. Israelis who died were often mentioned individually and by name with reference to their families and professions which humanized them in comparison to anonymous Palestinians.
"
So not only is the reporting frequency different, the language use is also completely different depending on which party is being reported on.
This combined with the fact that multiple reporters have now leaked that their articles have to pass the IDF and get edited by them before being allowed for publication, often softening the language towards israel.
Ok can you understand how words like "slaughter" and "massacre" may more aptly apply to the October 7th attack than to the subsequent invasion?
On one side we have a mass terror attack involving 1000+ deaths. These were often done individually, with a single terrorist targeting and shooting a person in their home. Often these were accompanied by acts of torture, rape, mutilation, and desecration of corpses. In many cases children were shot in front of their parents. Oh and several hundred people were kidnapped. This invokes words like "slaughter", "massacre", "brutal", "inhuman", "sickening", etc.
On the other side we have a large scale counterattack with huge amounts of bombing, refugee camps, and urban warfare. This invokes words like "destruction", "uninhabitable", "aggressive", "excessive", etc.
It's completely unfair to call someone biased for using different diction to describe these events.