Peer-reviewed journal publishes data study on NY Times bias against Israel in Gaza war coverage

A peer-reviewed academic journal publishes a data study that found a bias against Israel in The New York Times’s coverage of the Gaza war.

The study, by Edieal Pinker of the Yale school of management, says that the newspaper downplayed Israeli losses incurred after the October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel and minimized the role of Palestinian violence in perpetuating the conflict.

The Times of Israel covered the study last year.

The study’s final version is published in the Studies in Conflict & Terrorism academic journal.

The study analyzed 1,559 articles about the conflict in The New York Times from the date of the Hamas-led onslaught that launched the war on October 7, 2023, through June 7, 2024.

The report argued that the coverage “assign[ed] near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel while diminishing Hamas’s role in sustaining the conflict.”

The coverage often omitted Israeli military losses, Hamas terrorist casualties and Palestinian violence after the October 7 attack, while often reporting on Palestinian suffering, the study said.

Israel was portrayed as the “sole aggressor” following the Hamas attack and “seemingly bears no costs from conducting the war except for a loss of international support and public sympathy,” while “Palestinians are portrayed as passive victims whose suffering grows daily as they are relentlessly attacked by the Israeli military,” the study says.

Pro-Israel activists have long accused the Times of being biased against Israel, while pro-Palestinian activists have often complained of what they perceive as a pro-Israel bias in the paper.

The New York Times said in response to the initial study that it “has covered this war with more rigor than virtually any other US news organization, reporting on the conflict from all angles.”

“Our editors make careful and deliberate choices about every story we publish to ensure our language, framing, prominence and tone remain true to our mission of independent journalism,” a spokesperson said. “We remain open to good-faith disagreement but will not change our coverage to buttress entrenched perspectives. Our commitment is to independent reporting that our readers can trust.”

Pinker says the published study is “mainly the same” as the initial report “but it is good to have the stamp of approval” of a peer-reviewed journal.