A peer-reviewed study of 1,559 New York Times articles on the Gaza war found that the newspaper’s coverage was biased against Israel, including by minimizing Israeli casualties and giving insufficient attention to Hamas’ role in the conflict.
Edieal Pinker of the Yale School of Management examined Times coverage published between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024, for research published in the academic journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.
Pinker concluded that the newspaper disproportionately focused on Palestinian suffering and violence attributed to Israel while giving less attention to Israeli casualties and Palestinian violence.
The study said the coverage “assign[ed] near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel while diminishing Hamas’s role in sustaining the conflict.”
“Personal accounts of Palestinian suffering appear two out of every three days, while comparable accounts of Israeli suffering rarely appear,” Pinker said.
The study also found that Israel was depicted as the “sole aggressor” after the Hamas attack and “seemingly bears no costs from conducting the war except for a loss of international support and public sympathy.”
By contrast, it said, “Palestinians are portrayed as passive victims whose suffering grows daily as they are relentlessly attacked by the Israeli military.”
The Times rejected Pinker’s assessment of its reporting. Responding to the study’s initial findings last year, the newspaper said it “has covered this war with more rigor than virtually any other US news organization, reporting on the conflict from all angles.”
“We remain open to good-faith disagreement but will not change our coverage to buttress entrenched perspectives,” the Times said.
More than 73,000 people have been killed in Gaza during the war, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health. The ministry’s overall death toll does not distinguish between terrorists and civilians and has not been independently verified.