MAJOR US NEWSPAPERS’ COVERAGE OF ISRAEL’S WAR ON GAZA ‘SHOWED BIAS’

Wed 10 January 2024:

A quantitative analysis by The Intercept shows leading US publications skewed their coverage towards Israeli narratives in the first six weeks of the assault on Gaza.

The Intercept said it had collected more than 1,000 articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times about the war 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,” The Intercept said.

The newspapers in question used the term “slaughter” to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1. “Massacre” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2, while “horrific” was used 36 to 4.

Despite Israel’s war on Gaza being perhaps the deadliest war for children – almost entirely Palestinian – in modern history, “Only two headlines out of over 1,100 news articles in the study mention the word ‘children’ related to Gazan children”, The Intercept found.

During the period of The Intercept’s study, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times mentioned antisemitism more than Islamophobia (549 versus 79) — and this was before the “campus antisemitism” meta-controversy that was contrived by Republicans in CongressOpens in a new tab beginning the week of December 5.

Despite many high-profile instances of both antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism during the survey period, 87 percent of mentions of discrimination were about antisemitism, versus 13 percent mentions about Islamophobia, inclusive of related terms.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

______________________________________________________________

FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:

WhatsApp CHANNEL
https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaAtNxX8fewmiFmN7N22