A new analysis has revealed that there is “systematic bias in favor of Israel” in Western media’s coverage of the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, stressing that some of the news agencies are “dehumanizing Palestinians” and “legitimizing” the occupying regime’s crimes in the besieged territory.
According to an Intercept analysis of major media coverage on Tuesday, leading American newspapers, which play an influential role in shaping US views of the Israeli war on Gaza, are paying little attention to Israel’s brutal war and blockade in Gaza.
The Intercept further noted that it has gathered 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 flagrant imbalance in the way Israeli figures are covered versus Palestinians, with usages that favor Israeli narratives over Palestinian ones.
The Intercept went on to say that the print media outlets are disproportionately emphasizing Israeli deaths in the war, even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli deaths.
Highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” were used to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians, it added.
Despite Israel’s war on Gaza being perhaps the deadliest war for children in modern history, there is scant mention of the word “children” and related terms in the headlines of articles surveyed by The Intercept.
The Intercept also noted that the word “journalists” and its iterations such as “reporters” and “photojournalists” only appear in nine headlines out of over 1,100 articles studied.
In order to obtain this data, the Intercept explained that it has searched for all articles that contained relevant words such as “Palestinian,” “Gaza,” “Israelis.”
In reaction to the survey, Arwa Damon, a former CNN correspondent and now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, DC, think-tank, said these “double standards” reflect a broader tendency of Western media organizations to portray Muslims and Arabs as “less than human.”
Some experts and journalists also said that this bias in favor of Israelis is “irreparably damaging” the credibility of news agencies considered “mainstream” in the eyes of Arabs and others.
