CNN and MSNBC’s first 100 days of reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza showed a consistent double standard in its coverage, with Palestinians receiving far less sympathetic and humanizing coverage than either Israelis during the same period or Ukrainians during the first 100 days after Russia’s invasion, a Nation analysis of major media coverage has found.
Finding 1:
Sympathetic victims like journalists, refugees, and children are mentioned more in Ukraine than in Gaza, despite a significantly wider gap in casualties and human suffering.
Finding 2:
On CNN and MSNBC, emotive words such as “brutal,” “massacre,” “slaughter, “barbaric,” and “savage” were overwhelmingly used to describe the killing of Israelis and Ukrainians, and almost never used to describe the killing of Palestinians.
Finding 3:
CNN and MSNBC covered the impact of Russia’s invasion on civilians twice as often as they did the impact of Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza on civilians, despite the latter having a death toll five times that of the former.
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We do not do this to imply that Ukrainians were somehow unworthy of the compassionate coverage they received. But highlighting biases in US media is impossible without having a point of reference, and given the closeness in time and the total inversion of the geopolitical dynamics, the coverage of Ukraine is a useful way of showing that American media can, indeed, be broadly sympathetic when it chooses to be. The point of this analysis is not that US media should reduce its coverage of the tragedies in Ukraine to achieve parity with Gaza, but that it should elevate its coverage of the suffering in Gaza to be comparable to that of Ukraine, with the same urgent and moralizing tone.
CNN and MSNBC’s pointed lack of sympathy with Palestinians is also important to examine because the media’s consistent dehumanization and erasure of their suffering has helped 12 months of a killing campaign, backed by unending American military and political support, that is unprecedented in the 21st century, according to Oxfam International. Israel’s operations have been characterized by a level of brutality that is difficult to capture with statistics, but here are two examples: As of January, Save the Children was reporting that an average of 10 children a day in Gaza were losing one or both of their legs per day, and in April, UN Women estimated that 19,000 children had been orphaned.