Coverage after Oct. 7 gave substantially less attention to Israeli military casualties and continued attacks against Israelis.
By United with Israel Staff
A sweeping study of more than 1,500 New York Times articles on the Israel-Hamas war found that the newspaper’s coverage overwhelmingly emphasized Palestinian suffering while frequently minimizing Hamas’s role in sustaining the conflict and overlooking Israeli casualties.
The study, conducted by Edieal Pinker of the Yale School of Management and published in the academic journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, examined 1,559 Times news articles published between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024. Pinker documented what he described as a dominant narrative assigning “near-exclusive agency and responsibility” to Israel.
According to the research, the Times repeatedly presented the conflict through a framework beginning with Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, followed by Israeli military action and mounting Palestinian casualties. Coverage after Oct. 7, however, gave substantially less attention to Israeli military casualties, Hamas terrorist casualties and continued Palestinian attacks against Israelis.
Personal stories depicting Palestinian suffering appeared roughly two out of every three days during the period examined, according to the study, while comparable accounts focusing on Israeli suffering were rare.
The research also examined specific forms of violence that received little or no coverage. For example, the study found six incidents in which Hezbollah rocket or anti-tank missile attacks wounded Israeli civilians during one period, none of which were reported by the Times despite the newspaper publishing 25 articles discussing violence along Israel’s northern border.
The methodology excluded editorials, opinion pieces and letters, focusing specifically on news coverage. Articles were reviewed at least twice, with disputed classifications undergoing additional rounds of review and inter-coder reliability testing.
The Times has rejected the characterization of its reporting as biased.
The newspaper previously said it had covered the war “with more rigor than virtually any other US news organization,” arguing that its journalists reported on the conflict from multiple perspectives.
“We remain open to good-faith disagreement but will not change our coverage to buttress entrenched perspectives,” the Times said in response to earlier findings from the research.
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