Media Coverage of War Victims: Journalistic Biases in Reporting on Israel and Gaza

Abstract

October 7th 2023 marked the start of a war against Gaza, which is considered one of the most devastating wars in modern history and has led to a stark attitudinal divide within and between countries. To investigate the role of media bias in reporting on this asymmetrical warfare, we analyzed over 14,000 news articles published during the first year of war in three Western (The New York Times, BBC, CNN) and one non-Western English-language outlets (Al Jazeera English). Exploring the media narratives concerning Israeli and Palestinian victims experiencing hardship, we found three systematic biases in Western media. 1) Compared to Palestinian victims, represented mainly as undifferentiated collectives, Israeli victims were more likely to be portrayed as identifiable individual human beings. 2) Despite the striking difference in all forms of hardship (casualties, displacement, etc.), Western journalists created a false balance, equating Israeli and Palestinian suffering, by persistently referring back to the 7th of October massacre, even in the absence of new events involving Israeli victims. 3) When reporting on numbers of Palestinian (vs. Israeli) victims, journalists used language that casts doubt about the credibility of the information and the reputation of the source providing it, thereby selectively undermining the reader's trust in the information regarding Palestinian suffering. Together, our analysis reveals a series of systematic journalistic biases in high-profile Western media that are absent or greatly reduced in Al Jazeera.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Total Number of Relevant Articles per News Source.a) The bar plot shows the overall count of relevant articles per each of the four media sources. b) the timeline plot below shows the same number of articles but spread out over time along with major war events that affected Palestinian and Israeli sides displayed in green and blue respectively. Both plots cover the first 12 months of the conflict.
• Figure 2: Results of Individualized vs. Category-based Reporting Analysis.a) Ratio of Individualized to Grouped mentions per side for each media source. b) Left: Individualized casualty-related story counts per side for each media source. Right: Actual casualty counts for both sides in the first 12 months. c) Proportion of Western media’s Israeli casualty stories mentioning Oct 7 or hostages. d) Weekly average difference in Vividness of Emotions scores across media source during the first 12 months.
• Figure 3: Results of Quantifying the Human Cost of War Analysis.a) A comparison of the total number of articles published by each news outlet compared to the subsets containing at least one CVN about Palestine and those with at least one CVN about Israel. b) The weekly proportion of expected mentions allocated to the Palestinian side ($\Delta P_n$) based on the baseline model, shown for each news outlet. c) A bar plot displaying the total number of doubt-casting phrases per source, alongside additional charts breaking down the counts by the type of doubt-casting technique used by each outlet.