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.
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.