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.