The New York Times coverage of the Gaza war “offers a distorted view of the conflict,” focusing on the suffering of Palestinians, their casualties and Gaza’s destruction while de-emphasizing Israeli suffering, according to a Sept. 7 study in the journal Studies in Conflict andTerrorism.
Edieal Pinker, of the Yale School of Management, studied 1,559 news articles in the newspaper between Oct. 7, 2023 and June 7, 2024 and found a “dominant narrative consistent with a framing that assigns near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel while diminishing Hamas’s role in sustaining the conflict.”
The Times depicted Hamas on Oct. 7 as the perpetrator of a brutal assault on Israel, but starting the following day, Israel was portrayed as “the sole aggressor,” and reporting in theTimes “consistently diminished Hamas’s role in the war beyond starting it,” according to the study.
In the period examined, Israeli violence was frequently mentioned and Palestinian violence was only included infrequently.
“Palestinians are portrayed as passive victims, whose suffering grows daily as they are relentlessly attacked by the Israeli military,” according to the study. “Personal accounts of Palestinian suffering appear two out of every three days, while comparable accounts of Israeli suffering rarely appear.”
“Once the Israeli counteroffensive began, it also appears that even Israeli civilians are viewed less as victims,” the study found.
The Times narrative leads the reader to think that the Israelis have not paid a high price outside of a loss of international support and popular sympathy, it said. Yet, in the period studied, the Israel Defense Forces lost 364 soldiers and several thousand were wounded, many seriously. Thirty-one Israeli civilians were also killed.
The Times reporting on the post-Oct. 7 Israeli casualties has been “thin,” according to the study. Meanwhile, a “Times reader will never go more than five days in a row without an article mentioning a personal story of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering from the war,” it stated. “This pattern of reporting thus contributes to the perception that post-Oct. 7 the war is a one-sided affair.”
“When you didn’t think you could have more contempt for the New York Times and the bias of mainstream media, this will solidify your outrage as to how unreliable once respected and now discredited news organizations have become,” stated Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel, about the study.
The Times stated that it “has covered this war with more rigor than virtually any other U.S. news organization, reporting on the conflict from all angles.”
But Pinker said that the Times narrative made an “implied moral judgment” that the way Israel has waged the war is “immoral.”
The study quoted a Jan. 4, 2025, Times interview with then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “One of the things that I found a little astounding throughout is that for all of the understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza, you hear virtually nothing from anyone since Oct. 7 about Hamas,” Blinken said at the time.
“Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender—I don’t know what the answer is to that,” he said. “Israel, on various occasions has offered safe passage to Hamas’s leadership and fighters out of Gaza. Where is the world? Where is the world, saying, ‘Yeah, do that! End this! Stop the suffering of people that you brought on.’”
Pinker said that he isn’t accusing the newspaper of “bias,” as that would require a benchmark of what “unbiased” reporting looks like. He is pointing out imbalances in Times reporting that could impact reader opinions “in a direction that is at odds with reality.”
“It is my hope that the analyses presented in this study help increase understanding of how choices in what to cover can create an imbalanced perspective of an important issue,” he wrote. “The result of these choices can be to shift a newspaper, in this case the New York Times, from being a reporter of the news to a manufacturer of the same.”
“This study also raises the question of whether the reporting has made a resolution of the conflict more or less likely,” he wrote. “If public opinion in the United States is shaped by a framing that systematically downplays one side’s casualties and attributes near-exclusive agency to a single belligerent, then mediators can be constrained in the solutions they propose, and these will be rejected.”
