Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza showed a consistent bias against Palestinians, according to an Intercept analysis of major media coverage.

The Intercept collected more than 1,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times about Israel’s war on Gaza and tallied up the usages of certain key terms and the context in which they were used. The tallies reveal a gross imbalance in the way Israelis and pro-Israel figures are covered versus Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices — with usages that favor Israeli narratives over Palestinian ones.

The Washington Post employed “massacre” several times in its reporting to describe October 7. “President Biden faces growing pressure from lawmakers in both parties to punish Iran after Hamas’s massacre,” one report from the Post says. A November 13 story from the paper about how Israel’s siege and bombing had killed 1 in 200 Palestinians does not use the word “massacre” or “slaughter” once. The Palestinian dead have simply been “killed” or “died” — often in the passive voice.

The lack of coverage for the unprecedented killing of children and journalists, groups that typically elicit sympathy from Western media, is conspicuous. By way of comparison, more Palestinian children died in the first week of the Gaza bombing than during the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, yet the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times ran multiple personal, sympathetic stories highlighting the plight of children during the first six weeks of the Ukraine war.

As with children, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times focused on the risks to journalists in the Ukraine war, running several articles detailing the hazards of reporting on the war in the first six weeks after Russia’s invasion. Six journalists were killed in the early days of the Ukraine war, compared to 48 killed in the first six weeks of Israel’s Gaza bombardment.