The New York Times’ coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has generated “sympathy for the Palestinian people” while simultaneously “diminishing Hamas’s responsibility for their situation and the continuation of the war,” according to a recently published study by Yale professor Edieal Pinker, the Jerusalem Post reports.
With the goal of assessing imbalances in coverage that may influence readers’ views, Pinker conducted 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 revealed a “dominant narrative” centered around the number of Palestinians killed due to Israel’s military response to the October 7 Hamas attack, rather than focusing on 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 showed that, in the articles analyzed, the word “Israel” was mentioned three times more often than “Hamas.”
Of the 1,561 articles in the sample, only 105 (7%) contained instances where the frequency of the word “Hamas” was greater than or equal to the frequency of the word “Israel.”
In total, the word “Israel” appeared 27,205 times, compared to 8,499 times for “Hamas” across all the articles in the analysis.
Pinker’s study dismisses the argument that the reason “Israel” appears more often is due to the fact that the Jewish State has “more independence than the Palestinians and thus will have more freedom of action.”
If that were the case, he argued, there would be less imbalance in the ratio of mentions of Hezbollah and Iran. However, the data showed that the imbalance remained the same.
Moreover, while personal stories of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering are generally featured 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 the war.”
It is worth noting, as Pinker points out, that The Times’ coverage of the war has faced criticism from both 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.”
Pinker also referenced a January 4 interview with The Times featuring former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in which Blinken remarked that it was “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.”
{Matzav.com}
As long as they call it Gulf of AMERICA and NOT Gulf of Mexico, then everything is OK.
You could say the same regarding NPR and the BBC.