The New York Times‘s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has generated “sympathy for the Palestinian people” while at the same time “diminishing Hamas’s responsibility for their situation and the continuation of the war,” according to a recently published study by Yale professor, Edieal Pinker.
With the aim of assessing imbalances in coverage that may influence readers’ views, Pinker carried out a quantitative analysis of 1,561 New York Times articles published between October 7, 2023 and June 7, 2024, that referenced both “Israel” and “Gaza.”
Pinker’s analysis indicated a “dominant narrative” that revolved around the number of Palestinians killed as a result of Israel’s military response to the October 7 Hamas attack rather than the losses on the Israeli side.
“Little mention is made of Israeli casualties post-October 7 or of Palestinian acts of violence post-October 7,” the study added, noting as well that “very few articles mention any Israeli suffering that is not directly related to the events of October 7.”
The study revealed that, in the articles studied, the word “Israel” was mentioned three times more frequently than “Hamas.”
Of the 1,561 articles in the sample, there were only 105 (7%) in which the number of times the word “Hamas” appeared was greater than or equal to the number of times the word “Israel” appeared.
In total, the word “Israel” appeared 27,205 times vs 8,499 for “Hamas” across all articles in the analysis.
Pinker’s study dismisses the argument that the reason “Israel” appears more is because the Jewish State has “more independence than the Palestinians and thus will have more freedom of action.”
If this were to be the case, he argued, there would be less of an imbalance in the ratio of mentions of Hezbollah and Iran. However, the data indicated the imbalance was the same.
Furthermore, while personal stories of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering are generally featured on two out of every three days, “it is common to go a week at a time without a single mention of IDF deaths even when such deaths were frequent.”
Pinker argued that the “net result of these imbalances and others is to create a depiction of events that is imbalanced toward creating sympathy for the Palestinian side, places most of the agency in the hands of Israel, is often at odds with actual events, and fails to give readers an understanding of how Israelis are experiencing thewar.”
It is worth noting, as Pinker does, that the Times coverage of the war has been criticized from both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli sides. However, Pinker claimed that “academic works purporting to show an anti-Israeli or pro-Palestine bias in the media are rarer.”
Media bias since start of war
Pinker referenced a January 4 interview the Times held with former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, where he said he found it “astounding that for all of the understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza, you hear virtually nothing from anyone since October 7 about Hamas.”
Blinken questioned why there has not been a “greater sustained condemnation and pressure on Hamas to stop what it started and to end the suffering of people that it initiated.”
Pinker’s study is one of a few submitted since the war began months regarding international media outlets’ coverage of the Israel-Hamas War, several of which corroborate Blinken’s statements.
A now well-known September report into the BBC’s coverage, led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, found a “deeply worrying pattern of bias against Israel” and that Israel was associated with genocide 14 times more than Hamas.
This led to the Asserson study’s conclusion that the BBC breached its editorial guidelines for news coverage more than 1,500 times since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War.
The research also showed that BBC recognized Hamas as a terrorist organization just 409 out of 12,459 times, totaling 3.2%, over the four-month period.
On the other hand, an OSINT analysis carried out by American left-wing publication The Intercept in January 2024, which has also since been cited frequently, claimed that in the first six weeks of the war, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, “showed a consistent bias against Palestinians.”
The Intercept‘s analysis at the time claimed the words “Israeli” or “Israel” appear more than “Palestinian” and that mentions of deaths of Israelis outnumbered those of Palestinians.
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