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.
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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.
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The rest of the article is also flawed.
For instance “[the media] mentioned antisemitism more than Islamophobia”. This presupposes that antisemitism should not be mentioned more than Islamophobia. But why?
If I said “The media mentioned Islamophobia more than Francophobia” then that’s not an example of bias, because Islamophobia has been newsworthy for years and nobody pays attention to the French.
So is antisemitism more newsworthy than Islamophobia? Maybe so, given the Stefanik hearings. Maybe not. But the Intercept hasn’t even considered this.
Likewise, they count usage of words like “massacre” and “slaughter”. But what is that supposed to prove? The Intercept presupposes an unbiased source would not associate “massacre” with Hamas more than Israelis, but why?
Finally, the Intercept wonders why “children” is not used more often in reporting. Here’s one possibility: the media treated dead adults and dead children equally, lumping them together in “total dead”. They are not singling groups out in a way that the Intercept would prefer. That’s the opposite of bias.
Thought experiment: if the media constantly reported “X deaths, of whom Y were Christians” wouldn’t that be kind of creepy? Why does someone’s religion even matter when tallying the dead? Well, the same could be said of someone’s age.
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similar rises
No, the article doesn’t even attempt to measure the rises, much less show that they were similar.
humanize the deaths on the Israeli side.
No, the Intercept is again looking for an axe to grind. For example:
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. Hamas’s assault last Saturday killed more than 1,300 people in Israel, including women, children and young music festivalgoers.
Here the Israeli children are uncounted. Is that an example of anti-Israeli bias? No, because despite counting only Palestinian children the media made the mistake of describing their methodology: children are those under 18. Less precise language would be better. Does “children” even appear elsewhere in that article?
“We have wounded, we have elderly, we have children who are in hospitals,” she said.
Clearly those are Israeli children. No? They are Palestinian? Yeah but this was 10/13 so what about all the mentions of Israeli children still in hospitals? None? The same article only mentions Palestinian “children” in hospitals? Ok, well the Intercept will have to report that as a counterpoint. Just kidding, this is the Intercept after all:
The aforementioned front-page New York Times report and a Washington Post column are rare exceptions to the dearth of coverage about Palestinian children.
The Intercept is worse than lazy, they think their readers are too dumb to remember the news.
Just the first six hits from just one Google search:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/03/gaza-premature-babies-dead-nasr/
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I’m unsure what your point is.
This is only in the first six weeks, current bias against Palestinians is even higher.
The Intercept doesn’t report on the deaths. It’s not a classic “news” site in the way these papers are. They mainly break scandals and leaks such as CNN and the IDF Censor .
The Intercept is measuring “bias” by comparing the ratio of Palestinians/Israeli deaths to the ratio of using the words “Palestinian” and “Israeli” in the media.
Which means according to the Intercept, if CNN writes “There have been 20000 Palestinian deaths and 1000 Israeli deaths” then this is another example of bias, because CNN only used “Palestinian” once in that sentence. Which is nonsense.
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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.
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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.
The point your making is at best that journalists aren’t biased in favor of Israel as a country, they are biased in favor of nation-state sanctioned slaughter. When a “terrorist” attacks people in their homes, that is horrific. When a nation-state levels an entire neighborhood, that’s a “counterattack.” The most charitable version of your argument is that these publications don’t just devalue Palestinian lives, they simply devalue all civilian lives when a nation state uses indescriminate force. So long as the people doing the killing are flying a internationally recognized flag and doing that killing in an impersonal way, it is not “tragic” or “horrific” or a “slaughter.” The fact that the human suffering that results is on a far greater scale is of no consequence, if a nation state does it it’s fine. Your argument is arguably far worse.
But that’s not what is happening here. If Russia or China had clustered two million minorities in a small walled area, and then bombed the ever living shit out of them, killing at least 10,000 women and children, displacing 90 percent of the population, cutting off food, water, and power for months at a time, do you think the NYT or WaPo would refrain from calling that a “massacre” or “slaughter” or “horrific”? Of course not, the bad guys killing civilians gets emotionally charged language. The “good guys” killing civilians is just the unavoidable consequence of a “counterattack” after a “horrific slaughter”, proportionality be damned.
This article actually does a great job of quantitfying this bias, I encourage you to actually read it.
In conclusion, take your head out of your ass.
No bombing little kids with amputated legs inside a hospital is far worse. Hamas didn’t shoot a single child.
What israel does is indiscriminate slaughter and Genocide.
You seem to still be repeating false propaganda from said outlets. The rape was a made up lie that has been debunked already.
October 7 was not an indiscriminate slaughter whatsoever. 1/3 of the casualties were military and that’s including a huge part of the civilians were killed by the IDF, who killed them to prevent hostages being taken.
Hamas didn’t shoot a single child
Ok mate you do you.
Crazy statement isn’t it. Goes to show how much brainwashing the media has done that you find it strange.
Only 35 deaths on Oct 7 were children. And we have zero evidence of Hamas killing any of them. Much evidence of israel killing them by shelling the Kibbutzes though. And not to forget lying about it afterwards that Hamas did it.
We have plenty of evidence of Hamas gunmen sparing children too. https://youtu.be/mc5iG3DX7ho
Ah yes, electronicintifada.net, well known for fact-based unbiased reporting. I think your tinfoil hat may be on a bit too tight, but again, you do you.
I’m sorry they’re not making up rape fictions about Hamas. You’re going to have to do with an article that actually has verifiable sources and evidence inside of it.
