by Arjun Walia, The Pulse:
Multiple investigations have discovered an extreme bias from various mainstream media outlets when it comes to covering the Israeli-Palestine conflict
In the last 10 months, more than 13,000 Palestinian children and 30,000 Palestinian people have been killed by Israeli military forces. All of this stemmed from an October 7 Hamas attack, killing approximately 1200 Israeli citizens.
Multiple analyses over the past few months have found an overwhelming bias against Palestinians in the mainstream media. This includes coverage from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Lost Angele’s Times, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, for example.
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We’ve seen outlets like these emphasize Israeli deaths in the conflict, using contentious language to describe the killing of Israelis, but not Palestinians.
Videos like this, for example, which show an Israeli army drone pursuing and bombing four civilian Palestinian youths attempting to reach their destroyed homes at the start of last February are never shown. It’s reminiscent of the collateral murder video shared by Wikileaks in 2010.
This discovery of bias is why Pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied the lobby of The New York Times as early as November, demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza while accusing the media of showing a bias towards Israel in its coverage.
For example, a quantitative analysis by The Column of the first month of conflict shows that Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesperson, Peter Lerner, was broadcast live on the three channels for 19 out of the 30 days between October 7 and November. He was on CNN 26 times, Fox News 15 times, and MSNBC 3 times.
Furthermore, by October 24 Israelis had been mentioned a total of 95,468 times while Palestinians were mentioned 18,982 times despite the fact that Palestinian deaths were skyrocketing.
It was also discovered that the term ‘massacre’ was used far more to describe the deaths of Israeli citizens during the October 7 Hamas attack than it had been used to describe the deaths of Palestinian people.
In fact, from October 7 to November 7 it was never used to describe the 11,000 Palestinian deaths (at that point) but was used 770 times by Fox News, 503 times by CNN, and 382 times by MSNBC to describe Israeli casualties.
The mentions of Palestinians ‘massacred’ did not increase with the actual number of Palestinians massacred.
In an analysis done by The Intercept, it was found that in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, the words “Israeli” or “Israel” appear more than “Palestinian” even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli deaths. For every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once.
For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times — or a rate 16 times more per death than that of the Palestinians.
“Highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around. (When the terms appeared in quotes rather than the editorial voice of the publication, they were omitted from the analysis.)
The term “slaughter” was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and “massacre” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. “Horrific” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
The Intercept investigation also found that, despite Israel’s war on Gaza being possibly the deadliest war for children, there is hardly any mention of the word “children” in the headlines.
“Only two headlines out of over 1,100 news articles in the study mention the word “children” related to Gazan children. In a notable exception, the New York Times ran a late-November front-page story on the historic pace of killings of Palestinian women and children, though the headline featured neither group.
Despite Israel’s war on Gaza being perhaps the deadliest war for children — almost entirely Palestinian — in modern history, there is scant mention of the word “children” and related terms in the headlines of articles surveyed by The Intercept.
Meanwhile, more than 6,000 children were reported killed by authorities in Gaza at the time of the truce, with the number topping 10,000 today.”
Between October 7 and 24, the Column found that Palestinian children across Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN were mentioned 699 times, while Israeli children were mentioned 1,221 times.
