William Youmans is an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and the director of the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication.
Mainstream American news coverage of Israel's bombardment and invasion of Gaza since the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7 has been marred by a deep-seated bias. News outlets have consistently prioritized Israeli lives over Palestinian ones, adopting Israeli framing and narratives even when they fail to stand up to scrutiny. For a democratic media to function well requires a commitment to balance, objectivity and proportionality robust enough to withstand political pressures. Despite the biases of U.S. media coverage of Gaza, American public opinion has shown, in general, a more informed balance, suggesting the importance of alternative sources of news and information, such as independent journalism and social media. If traditional news outlets don't adjust to this new information ecology, and correct their own track record of partiality, their credibility with younger audiences may be lost for good.
Initial research into U.S. news media coverage of Gaza reveals an undeniable pattern of pro-Israel bias. A review of major newspapers by Adam Johnson and Othman Ali for The Intercept exposed a dramatically lop-sided picture by the most highly regarded press institutions in the country. In The New York Times, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, "Israeli" or "Israel" generally got far more mentions in news stories than "Palestinian" or variations thereof, "even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli deaths," Johnson and Ali reported. Strong, condemnatory adjectives like "slaughter," "massacre" and "horrific" were almost exclusively applied to the murders of Israeli civilians. When it came to headlines about children killed or injured, there was very little mention of young Palestinian victims—only two out of more than 1,100 news articles published from Oct. 7 to Nov. 25, a period in which the Israeli military killed 6,000 children in Gaza. This obfuscates the scale of Israel's destruction of Palestine's future generations. More than 13,000 children have now been killed in Israel's war in Gaza, according to UNICEF.
In a series of numbers-driven infographics about U.S. newspapers, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mona Chalabi illustrated data showing how major newspapers devalued Palestinian lives. She drew a chart revealing that The New York Times gave disproportionately more attention to Israeli than Palestinian deaths. On average, every one Israeli death merited one news article, a reasonable one-to-one ratio. However, that was a rate four times greater than for Palestinian deaths in early coverage between Oct. 7 and Oct. 22. The results were also similarly imbalanced in The Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal, however, was far more tilted: for every 17 Palestinians killed, there was only one mention of Palestinian deaths in the Journal. The implication is that an Israeli life is simply more newsworthy than a Palestinian one.
News outlets have consistently prioritized Israeli lives over Palestinian ones, adopting Israeli framing and narratives even when they fail to stand up to scrutiny.
- William Youmans
Television news has not fared any better. In a study I conducted of the Sunday morning news talk shows on NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX, I found similar patterns in guest discussions about Gaza. While these shows are somewhat niche forums for elite political chatter and do not hold the outsized news influence they once did, they still draw larger audiences than cable television and often make headlines. Shows like Meet the Press (NBC), Face the Nation (CBS), This Week (ABC) and Fox News Sunday (FOX) overwhelmingly featured pro-Israel guests. Therefore, it was no surprise that the framing around Gaza aligned far more with pro-Israel talking points during the more than 50 shows that I analyzed from Oct. 8 to mid-January. Surprisingly, the dominant drivers of this one-sided discourse were U.S. officials and spokespeople, such as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and White House national security spokesman John Kirby.
Cable news networks were similarly skewed. An analysis of the first month of the war, by a Palestinian-American quantitative researcher who focuses on disinformation and censorship in mass media, found pervasive patterns of privileging pro-Israel framing and narratives. The spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Peter Lerner, appeared 44 times on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News that first month. The channels mentioned Israelis four times as often as they did Palestinians, even though Palestinian casualties far surpassed Israelis. Similar to the findings with the major U.S. newspapers, emotional terms like "massacre" were used to describe Israelis being killed almost exclusively. Often, the killing of Palestinians, even children, were presented through passive phrasing, such as "left to die," which obscures key information like the perpetrators' identity and even suggests the parents were at fault. The effect is to soften Israeli culpability. The study also found that by the time 11,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza by early November, the Israeli hostages held in Gaza were still getting more attention on American cable TV news.
What explains this media bias, this disjointed reflection of the grim realities in Gaza? There are multiple factors at play, all of which have been written about extensively in media criticism going back decades: the effects of corporate ownership structures that are risk-averse, the negative flak of mobilized interest groups, the lack of diversity in newsrooms, and perceived audience preferences given the interest in maximizing reach. However, the most vital source of media bias on foreign affairs coverage is simply U.S. foreign policy.
In their scathing 2007 book When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, scholars W. Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence and Steven Livingston diagnosed why news media fared so poorly under the George W. Bush administration, most of all over the invasion of Iraq when few news outlets challenged the White House spin about the case for war. They contrast the failures to scrutinize the Bush administration for obvious fiascos in Iraq, including the torture at Abu Ghraib, with more critical reporting of Bush's failed response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Their primary explanation is that most U.S. media show a general tendency to defer to power, especially among the vaunted Washington press corps. This servitude, they argued, was "deeply ingrained and continually reinforced in the culture and routines of mainstream journalism."
"Katrina marked a turning point," they write, "because the usual rules of the media game were temporarily suspended," as reporters witnessed the aftermath of the hurricane themselves—and the clear lack of a response by a government obviously unprepared for such a disaster. "Some reporters on the scene, disturbed by what they saw, went on the offensive against the very sources to whom they usually deferred." But Katrina is still the exception.
"The press reported reality during the Iraq years largely as the Bush administration had scripted it, even when the script seemed bizarrely out of line with observable events," Bennett, Lawrence and Livingston argued. The echoes to Gaza today are unmistakable, with coverage that parrots the talking points of both U.S. and Israeli officials, downplays dissent within Washington over U.S. military support to Israel, and suppresses or spins countervailing evidence about civilian suffering in Gaza. If the past is any guide, this deference will hold until fractures in elite views start to show. In Iraq, this period of obsequiousness to power was most intense in the first years of the war, as many media outlets slowly became more critical of the U.S. occupation—but long after legitimizing a disastrous policy choice. It was too little, too late.
The most vital source of media bias on foreign affairs coverage is simply U.S. foreign policy.
- William Youmans
Today, many Americans have not been deluded by biased media coverage of what is transpiring in Gaza. A recent poll by YouGov and The Economist found that half of the voters surveyed who backed Joe Biden in 2020 agreed that Israel is "committing genocide against Palestinian civilians." A third of all registered voters agreed. This is despite the fact that there is effectively a media blackout of the word "genocide" to describe Israel's conduct in Gaza among leading U.S. news outlets. This shift in public opinion could even prove politically damaging to President Biden's reelection bid.
Such rampant institutional failures by news media pose a great risk to their futures. News consumers lose trust when media disavow the vital functions of balance, honesty and other features of their watchdog role, which requires critically questioning those in power. In the past, news-hungry members of the public had fewer alternatives for information, which allowed news media to mask over bias. But the public now is far more sophisticated in navigating a larger and more fractured news and media landscape that includes more independent journalists and editorially distinct foreign news media, such as Al Jazeera English. With all these new sources of information, including the wide array of citizen journalists on the ground posting directly to social media, news audiences can easily draw contrasts with traditional news media coverage, exposing misleading framing and omissions.
This larger tension is playing out in many newsrooms. There has been widely documented unrest in the halls of CNN, NPR and The New York Times, driven mainly by young journalists who rely on more diverse sources of information and question the institutional overreliance on U.S. and Israeli officialdom about the war in Gaza. As with many members of the public, these journalists have called out these biases, which evoke the media failures of the Bush era over Iraq. The credibility of these news organizations, and indeed their futures, could hinge on whether or not they listen to them.
