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The Pro-Israel Bias in Three of U. S.’s Most Influential Newspapers

No surprise here, but good for the record. Complicity in crimes comes in different colours and shades.

The Intercept:

A comprehensive new analysis by The Intercept has revealed the full extent of the pro-Israel bias in three of America’s most influential newspapers: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

These disturbing findings show directly how mainstream media coverage dehumanizes Palestinians and devalues their lives. 

For instance, during the first six weeks of the war, even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli ones, Israelis were mentioned at a rate of 16 times more per death than Palestinians. Highly emotive terms like “slaughter” and “massacre” were used 60 times more often to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians. A similar analysis of cable news coverage by the same authors found an even more extreme anti-Palestinian bias.

The U.S. news media’s refusal to recognize Palestinian humanity is directly abetting the ongoing bloodshed and shielding Israel and the Biden administration from political accountability.

The Intercept is among the few U.S.-based news outlets that refuse to shade the truth about Israel’s brutalization of Gaza.

The numbers don't lie: Israel’s killings in Gaza are being systematically discounted in scope and emotional weight compared to the deaths of Israelis on October 7.

Palestinian deaths are mostly presented as arbitrarily high, abstract figures, while Israeli deaths are described using emotive language like “massacre,” “slaughter,” or “horrific.”

Despite this asymmetry, polls show shifting sympathy toward Palestinians and away from Israel among Democrats, with massive generational splits driven in part by the fact that younger people get their news from different sources — including The Intercept.

The Intercept was founded in direct response to the national security establishment groupthink that dominates the U.S. mainstream media, and our reporting has never been more needed than it is as we witness the ongoing slaughter in Gaza.

—The Intercept, an email of 22 January 2024.

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