threadDude is a left wing Israeli in Tel Aviv
The Official Israel-Gaza Thread
threadDude is a left wing Israeli in Tel Aviv
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Freed Israeli hostage says she was held in Gaza hospital with dozens of others — CNN
Hamas militants released Sharon Aloni Cunio and her twin three-year-old daughters in November, but she remains haunted by her experience and longs for the husband she was forced to leave behind.
apple.news
Pull Up the Roots
Veteran
i was kinda removed from this and didn't realize iran and pakistan were going at it. this is the first time i've been a little concerned about the hostilities spreading further....Both countries are really lookin for a reason to pull that 'bigger' trigger that would start the next WW
I don't think it'll escalate. Iran attacked Balochi area in Pakistan and the Pakistanis attacked Balochi area in Iran tonight. They''re going to spin it as them attacking seperatist groups to save face...
Already spun...
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Yup, Pakistan respects Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity that’s why they attacked Iran.
That’s the official line, I’m not even making this up
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
“Massacred” vs “Left to Die”: Documenting Media Bias Against Palestinians Oct 7 - Nov 7
A quantitative analysis of the first month of conflict, reveals how dehumanization is baked into the ideological cake of cable news.
www.columnblog.com
“Massacred” vs “Left to Die”: Documenting Media Bias Against Palestinians Oct 7 - Nov 7
A quantitative analysis of the first month of conflict, reveals how dehumanization is baked into the ideological cake of cable news.
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.
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.
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
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):
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:
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.
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post skewed coverage toward Israeli narratives, according to a quantitative analysis.
theintercept.com
THE NEW YORK Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza showed a consistent bias against Palestinians, according to an Intercept analysis of major media coverage.
The print media outlets, which play an influential role in shaping U.S. views of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, paid little attention to the unprecedented impact of Israel’s siege and bombing campaign on both children and journalists in the Gaza Strip.
Major U.S. newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7. Pro-Palestinian activists have accused major publications of pro-Israel bias, with the New York Times seeing protestsat its headquarters in Manhattan for its coverage of Gaza –– an accusation supported by our analysis.
The open-source analysis focuses on the first six weeks of the conflict, from the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that killed 1,139 Israelis and foreign workers to November 24, the beginning of the weeklong “humanitarian truce” agreed to by both parties to facilitate hostage exchanges. During this period, 14,800 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children, were killed by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Today, the Palestinian death toll is over 22,000.
The Intercept collected more than 1,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times about Israel’s war on Gaza and tallied up the usages of certain key terms and the context in which they were used. The tallies reveal a gross imbalance in the way Israelis and pro-Israel figures are covered versus Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices — with usages that favor Israeli narratives over Palestinian ones.
This anti-Palestinian bias in print media tracks with a similar survey of U.S. cable news that the authors conducted last month for The Column that found an even wider disparity.
The stakes for this routine devaluing of Palestinian lives couldn’t be higher: As the death toll in Gaza mounts, entire cities are leveled and rendered uninhabitable for years, and whole family lines are wiped out, the U.S. government has enormous influence as Israel’s primary patron and weapons supplier. The media’s presentation of the conflict means there are fewer political downsides to lockstep support for Israel.
Coverage from the first six weeks of the war paints a bleak picture of the Palestinian side, according to the analysis, one that stands to make humanizing Palestinians — and therefore arousing U.S. sympathies — more difficult.
To obtain this data, we searched for all articles that contained relevant words (such as “Palestinian,” “Gaza,” “Israeli,” etc.) on all three news websites. We then parsed through every sentence in each article and tallied the count of certain terms. For this analysis, we omitted all editorial pieces and letters to the editor. The basic data set is available here, and a full data set can be obtained by emailing ottoali99@gmail.com.
Our survey of coverage has four key findings.
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mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
Disproportionate Coverage of Deaths
In the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, the words “Israeli” or “Israel” appear more than “Palestinian” or variations thereof, 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 that of Palestinians.
Graphic: The Intercept
“Slaughter” of Israelis, Not 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.
One typical headline from the New York Times, in a mid-November story about the October 7 attack, reads, “They Ran Into a Bomb Shelter for Safety. Instead, They Were Slaughtered.” Compare this with the Times’s most sympathetic profile of Palestinian deaths in Gaza from November 18: “The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children.” Here “graveyard” is a quote from the United Nations and the killing itself is in passive voice. In its own editorial voice, the Times story on deaths in Gaza uses no emotive terms comparable to the ones in its story about the October 7 attack.
The Washington Post employed “massacre” several times in its reporting to describe October 7. “President Biden faces growing pressure from lawmakers in both parties to punish Iran after Hamas’s massacre,” one repor from the Post says. A November 13 story from the paper about how Israel’s siege and bombing had killed 1 in 200 Palestinians does not use the word “massacre” or “slaughter” once. The Palestinian dead have simply been “killed” or “died” — often in the passive voice.
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mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
Children and Journalists
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.
While the war on Gaza has been one of the deadliest in modern history for journalists — overwhelmingly Palestinians — the word “journalists” and its iterations such as “reporters” and “photojournalists” only appears in nine headlines out of over 1,100 articles studied. Roughly 48 Palestinian reporters had been killed by Israeli bombardment at the time of the truce; today, the death toll for Palestinian journalists has topped 100. Only 4 of the 9 articles that contained the words journalist/reporter were about Arab reporters.
The lack of coverage for the unprecedented killing of children and journalists, groups that typically elicit sympathy from Western media, is conspicuous. By way of comparison, more Palestinian children died in the first week of the Gaza bombing than during the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, yet the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times ran multiple personal, sympathetic stories highlighting the plight Washington Post column are rare exceptions to the dearth of coverage about Palestinian children.
As with children, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times focused on the risks to journalists in the Ukraine war, running several articles detailing the hazards of reporting on the war in the first six weeks after Russia’s invasion. Six journalists were killed in the early days of the Ukraine war, compared to 48 killed in the first six weeks of Israel’s Gaza bombardment.
Asymmetry in how children are covered is qualitative as well as quantitative. On October 13, the Los Angeles Times ran an Associated Press report that said, “The Gaza Health Ministry said Friday that 1,799 people have been killed in the territory, including more than 580 under the age of 18 and 351 women. Hamas’s assault last Saturday killed more than 1,300 people in Israel, including women, children and young music festivalgoers.” Notice that young Israelis are referred to as children while young Palestinians are described as people under 18.
During discussions around the prisoner exchanges, this frequent refusal to refer to Palestinians as children was even more stark, with the New York Times referring in one case to “Israeli women and children” being exchanged for “Palestinian women and minors.” (Palestinian children are referred to as “children” later in the report, when summarizing a human rights groups’ findings.)
A Washington Post report from November 21 announcing the truce deal erased Palestinian women and children altogether: “President Biden said in a statement Tuesday night that a deal to release 50 women and children held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners detained by Israel.” The brief did not mention Palestinian women and children at all.