Coverage of Gaza war in NYT and other major newspapers heavily favored Israel, analysis finds
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 at its headquarters in Manhattan for its coverage of Gaza –– an accusation supported by our analysis.
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 in a new tab 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.
The Intercept collected more than 1,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times about Israel’s war on Gaza and tallied up the usages of certain key terms and the context in which they were used. The tallies reveal a gross imbalance in the way Israelis and pro-Israel figures are covered versus Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices — with usages that favor Israeli narratives over Palestinian ones.
This anti-Palestinian bias in print media tracks with a similar survey of U.S. cable news that the authors conducted last month for The Column in a new tab that found an even wider disparity. [Continue reading…]