The Overwhelming Media Bias Against The Palestinians In The Mainstream Media Exposed
Multiple investigations have discovered an extreme bias from various mainstream media outlets when it comes to covering the Israeli-Palestine conflict
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In the last 10 months, more than 13,000 Palestinian children and 30,000 Palestinian people have been killed by Israeli military forces. All of this stemmed from an October 7 Hamas attack, killing approximately 1200 Israeli citizens.
Multiple analyses over the past few months have found an overwhelming bias against Palestinians in the mainstream media. This includes coverage from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Lost Angele’s Times, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, for example.
We’ve seen outlets like these emphasize Israeli deaths in the conflict, using contentious language to describe the killing of Israelis, but not Palestinians.
Videos like this, for example, which show an Israeli army drone pursuing and bombing four civilian Palestinian youths attempting to reach their destroyed homes at the start of last February are never shown. It’s reminiscent of the collateral murder video shared by Wikileaks in 2010.
This discovery of bias is why Pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied the lobby of The New York Times as early as November, demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza while accusing the media of showing a bias towards Israel in its coverage.
For example, a quantitative analysis by The Column of the first month of conflict shows that Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesperson, Peter Lerner, was broadcast live on the three channels for 19 out of the 30 days between October 7 and November. He was on CNN 26 times, Fox News 15 times, and MSNBC 3 times.
Furthermore, by October 24 Israelis had been mentioned a total of 95,468 times while Palestinians were mentioned 18,982 times despite the fact that Palestinian deaths were skyrocketing.
It was also discovered that the term ‘massacre’ was used far more to describe the deaths of Israeli citizens during the October 7 Hamas attack than it had been used to describe the deaths of Palestinian people.
In fact, from October 7 to November 7 it was never used to describe the 11,000 Palestinian deaths (at that point) but was used 770 times by Fox News, 503 times by CNN, and 382 times by MSNBC to describe Israeli casualties.
The mentions of Palestinians ‘massacred’ did not increase with the actual number of Palestinians massacred.
In an analysis done by The Intercept, it was found that in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, the words “Israeli” or “Israel” appear more than “Palestinian” even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli deaths. For every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once.
For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times — or a rate 16 times more per death than that of the Palestinians.
“Highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around. (When the terms appeared in quotes rather than the editorial voice of the publication, they were omitted from the analysis.)
The term “slaughter” was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and “massacre” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. “Horrific” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
The Intercept investigation also found that, despite Israel’s war on Gaza being possibly the deadliest war for children, there is hardly any mention of the word “children” in the headlines.
“Only two headlines out of over 1,100 news articles in the study mention the word “children” related to Gazan children. In a notable exception, the New York Times ran a late-November front-page story on the historic pace of killings of Palestinian women and children, though the headline featured neither group.
Despite Israel’s war on Gaza being perhaps the deadliest war for children — almost entirely Palestinian — in modern history, there is scant mention of the word “children” and related terms in the headlines of articles surveyed by The Intercept.
Meanwhile, more than 6,000 children were reported killed by authorities in Gaza at the time of the truce, with the number topping 10,000 today.”
Between October 7 and 24, the Column found that Palestinian children across Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN were mentioned 699 times, while Israeli children were mentioned 1,221 times.
“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).”
Another interesting finding from another investigation by The New York War Crimes found that The Times reported on antisemitism five times more often than Islamophobia.
It was also discovered that The New York Times quoted Israeli and American sources more than three times as often as Palestinian ones.
Israeli and American officials’ quotes outnumber Palestinians nine to one. With regards to what’s happening in Gaza at the time of this analysis, more than 1000 quotes from Israeli government and military officials were used, compared to less than 300 from Palestinian sources. More than 1000 quotes from American government and military officials were also used, a nation heavily allied with Israel.
Mainstream Media Has Become a Joke
Public trust in mainstream media has dropped drastically every single year, and currently remains at a record all time low. Their ability to provide nuance and a balanced, fair perspective is close to zero, while their desire to cover events in a way that pleases their ‘masters’ and suits the interests of government seems to be blatantly obvious. But this is something we’ve seen throughout history.
For example, a declassified document from the CIA archives from 1991 in the form of a letter from a CIA task force addressed to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency details the close relationship that exists between the CIA and mainstream media and academia.
The document states that the CIA task force “now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation,” and that “this has helped us turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success” stories,’ and has contributed to the accuracy of countless others.”
Furthermore, it explains how the agency has “persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.”
“The CIA was directing the coverage of American news organizations, overthrowing democratically elected governments (at times merely to benefit a favored corporation), establishing propaganda outfits to manipulate public sentiment, launching a long-running series of mind-control experiments on unwitting human subjects (purportedly contributing to the creation of the Unabomber), and—gasp—interfering with foreign elections. From there, it was a short hop to wiretapping journalists and compiling files on Americans who opposed its wars.”
- NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden, America’s Open Wound. The CIA is not your friend.
A great article you can read from our friend Dr. Madhava Setty titled “Israel’s 9/11” may also provide you with some deeper insight regarding mainstream media messaging and explanations of what really happened.
“Blame Hamas”
The media messaging above has contributed to, what clearly seems to be the minority, a number of people stating “blame Hamas” or giving thanks to Hamas. But there are a number of facts people making these statements never seem to acknowledge.
For example, one Wikileaks cable reveals that the Palestinian government had requested assistance from Israel in defeating Hamas. In another cable, we learn that Israel determined that Hamas’ rise in Gaza would benefit them as it would allow the IDF to “deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”
A diplomatic exchange between then Israeli Director of Military Intelligence, Major General Amos Yadlin, and US Ambassador to Israel Richard Jones showed Israeli support for a Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip which Israel could then declare Gaza to be a hostile entity. In the transcript, Yadlin told the US Ambassador that he would be “very happy” if Hamas formed a government in Gaza “as long as they have no (air or sea) port.”
WikiLeaks documents also show that Israel was interested in empowering Hamas in an attempt to end the first Intifada - Hamas "serves as a useful counter-force."
So, there are all these facts and more that permit a deeper discussion, including the number of times other countries have attempted to block Israeli accusations of war crimes and have them investigated. In the past, the US moved to block an International Criminal Court referral for alleged Israeli war crimes after the 2009 Goldstone report, which was commissioned by the Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva to investigate Israeli violations of international humanitarian and human rights law during the 2008/2009 conflict in Gaza.
I am quite certain in my belief that nobody wants genocide, murder and war, and that all of these experiences on our planet are, as Julian Assange found, “a result of media lies.” Massive amounts of propaganda have humans arguing and fighting with each-other, all for the purpose of clouding truth, preventing real solutions and putting more power and control into the hands of the military industrial complex, governments, and their mainstream media networks. How is it possible that the world shutdown for COVID, but it can’t shutdown for the death of more than 10,000 children in such a short period of time?
That being said, since we started our work in 2009, the shift in consciousness that has occurred and the amount of information that people are aware of is unbelievable. Jaw dropping events like what’s occurring in Palestine have always served as catalysts for even more people to “wake up,” so to speak.
The main point to remember is that what we hear and learn about when it comes to Israel and Hamas is most likely far from any objective truth. Citizens are subjected to propaganda by governments for geopolitical purposes. Events are shaped by narrative. Details are left out purposely. Nobody wants this, and those who ‘govern’ us are not doing so with transparency and goodness in mind.
At the same time, they have demonetized and censored networks like ours. So if you can, please become a paid or free subscriber!
I’ve witnessed the media bias against Palestinians for at least 40 years
What did Hamas expected would happen after they committed their October 7th crimes in Israel? Nothing?