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“Massacred” vs “Left to Die”: Documenting Media Bias Against Palestinians Oct 7 - Nov 7 [1]

['Adam Johnson']

Date: 2024-01

Note from Adam:

Hi all, this post is by an anonymous contributor going by the name “Otto”. Otto is a Palestinian-American quantitative researcher focusing on disinformation and censorship in mass media. This is his first post on substack. If you enjoyed it and would like to see more of his work, subscribe to his free substack to let him know you’re interested. He’s writing under a pseudonym because he works at a large media firm that will not take kindly to his research. He has an advanced degree in data science from the University of Oxford.

During the most recent conflict in Palestine/Israel, which has seen the killing of 11,000+ Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis, the three largest US news media channels have displayed a clear and quantifiable bias in favor of Israel in its war on Gaza. Without any further editorializing, let’s take a look at 5 key findings that demonstrate this:

Note: this research is based on publicly available data and is easily replicable. We include our methodology and sources at the end of this post.

Finding 1: IDF spokesman Peter Lerner was interviewed 44 times on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News in the span of 30 days and given free rein to mislead and distort with little to no pushback.

Our research found that the IDF spokesperson, Peter Lerner was broadcast live on the three channels a total of 19 out of the 30 days between October 7th - November 7th.

Throughout these interviews, Lerner often states (with no proof and almost no push-back from the news anchors) that all structures, be they schools, universities, places of worship, and civilian homes, are legitimate targets. Here’s one clip from his interview with Dana Bash in which he claims that hospitals are fair game, and in which Ms. Bash agrees.

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Finding 2: Israelis are mentioned more than Palestinians every day on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX. This remained the case even as Palestinian deaths began to far outpace Israeli deaths.

The graph above captures every 30-second segment on any of these news channels in which the terms “Israeli” or “Palestinian” or any adjacent terms were mentioned between October 7 and November 7. The cumulative mentions of Israelis and Palestinians between these two dates show that day by day, the gap in coverage of Palestinians and Israelis kept increasing. By October 24th, Israelis had been mentioned a total of 95,468 times while Palestinians were mentioned 18,982 times (see below).

The three channels all maintained about the same ratio of Palestine:Israel coverage.

Finding 3: The news apparently gets to decide what is (and what is not) a ‘massacre’. According to the three channels, only Israelis were massacred.

Below are the number of 30-second segments from the three channels in which the term ‘massacre’ is used in reference to Israelis versus Palestinians.

In the hundreds of times that the highly charged term ‘massacre’ was mentioned on the three channels between October 7 and November 7, it was used by Israeli and US politicians, government officials, and pundits. More importantly, it was used by newscasters and presenters to express what happened to Israelis on October 7. Those same newscasters never used that term when referring to 11,000+ Palestinians (the vast majority of which were civilians and about 5,000 were children) killed by the Israeli army.

In the cases where the word massacre did appear in relation to Palestinians, it was because 1) a Palestinian who was directly affected was interviewed, 2) a pro-Palestine advocate was interviewed, 3) it was prefaced by the statement “…what is being called a massacre.”

Here are two unedited snippets captured from automated transcriptions of MSNBC broadcasts, in which the term massacre is used in relation to Israelis, and 3 in relation to Palestinians (the full dataset is here):

Israel 1.“…here are several videos that you can watch and see exactly what happened. they are very, very, difficult videos to watch. this was a massacre.” 2. “…some of the videos and the pictures that i saw room minded me of the massacre in bucha by russian forces in ukraine. dozens and dozens of bodies of” Palestine 1. “…rushed the israeli consulate in istanbul. they are all reacting to what palestinians call a massacre. that explosion at the -- hospital in gaza city. 2. “…blast. that has inflamed already high tensions across the region. nbc's richard engel has more. -- palestinians call it a massacre and say -- “

The mentions of Palestinians ‘massacred’ did not increase with the actual number of Palestinian massacred.

This is a consistent pattern that’s observable anytime the death counts are compared. A particularly egregious example from The Washington Post’s David Ignatius from Nov. 12:

This war has produced deeply horrifying images: Israeli children assaulted in barbaric ways by Hamas terrorists; Palestinian children left to die under Israeli bombardment. It’s a war in which we’ve all looked into the abyss.

Note that Children are “assaulted in barbaric ways” by “terrorists” but Palestinian children are simply “left to die” (presumably by their heartless parents) “under Israeli bombardment.” The former is deliberate, cold, ideological; the latter, passive, sterile, reluctant—and potentially also the responsibility of Palestinians.

Finding 4: The ~230 hostages got more coverage on CNN and Fox News than the 11,000+ Palestinians killed by Israel.

The graph below shows the number of 30-second segments in which the words ‘hostage’ or ‘kidnap’ and adjacent terms were mentioned compared to the number of times the term ‘Palestinian’ and adjacent terms were used, between October 7 and November 7.

Finding 5: By October 24, more than 3,000 Palestinian children had been killed. They were mentioned less than the ~30 children among the 1,200 total Israelis killed by Hamas.

Between October 7th and 24th, we found that Palestinian children across Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN were mentioned 699 times, while Israeli children were mentioned 1,221 times. Even as the death toll of Palestinian children exceeded the total death toll of all Israelis killed in the Hamas attack, the number of on-air mentions of Palestinian children remained lower on average than on-air mentions of Israeli children.

When we looked more closely at the associated words that appeared in the same 30-second snippets from each of these channels, we found that descriptive words (eg. ‘horrific’, ‘horrible’, ‘brutal’, etc.) were used disproportionately in relation to Israeli children. The graph below demonstrates the usage of some of those words (full data set here).

Perhaps the lack of compassion towards Palestinian children is because they are “indoctrinated” and “radicalized” and therefore legitimate targets of Israeli airstrikes.

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[1] Url: https://www.columnblog.com/p/massacred-vs-left-to-die-documenting

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