NY Times downplays Israeli post-Oct. 7 losses, Hamas role in war, data study says

NEW YORK — New York Times coverage of the Gaza war downplayed Israeli losses incurred after the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel and minimized the role of Palestinian violence in perpetuating the conflict, according to a Yale professor’s analysis.

Edieal Pinker, a professor and deputy dean at the Yale School of Management, analyzed 1,561 New York Times articles about the war published between October 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024, for the study released last month.

The coverage fit into a “specific narrative,” the study said. That narrative said that Hamas carried out a “brutal assault” on Israelis, mostly civilians, but that after that attack, Israel was the “sole aggressor” and bore few costs from the war, aside from declining international support.

The coverage following the Hamas attack instead focused on Palestinian suffering, portraying Palestinians as “passive victims whose suffering grows daily.” There was extensive coverage of Israeli violence, but less mention of Israeli hostages, Hamas casualties, Palestinian violence, Israeli casualties after the Hamas attack and Israeli suffering that was not directly tied to October 7.

“Little mention is made of Israeli casualties post-October 7 or of Palestinian acts of violence post-October 7, even as Israel and Hamas were locked in intensive combat over the eight months of the study period,” the study said.

The study was published last month in SSRN, a platform for working research papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed. The study was not sponsored by Yale. Pinker has a background in data analysis and has previously studied demographics in US Jewish communities.

The New York Times is regularly criticized by both Israel’s supporters, and its detractors, for its coverage of the conflict, including before the start of the latest war.

The study said it was not looking to prove bias in the reporting, because bias is statistically difficult to determine, and evidence of an editorial slant would need to take journalists’ intent into account. Israel is also relatively open to journalists, unlike Gaza, where the authoritarian Hamas rulers suppress dissent and reporting. The different levels of access impact coverage and could create unintentional bias, the study said.

The goal of the study was to quantify imbalances that could sway readers’ opinions “in a direction that is at odds with reality,” the paper said.

Pinker, a Jewish dual US-Israeli citizen, said he was inspired to do the study by following coverage of the war in both American and Israeli press. He noticed a differing pattern in coverage, with the US media focused far more on what Gazans were experiencing, and decided to do a systematic investigation.

“People who were only getting a diet of the non-Israeli press were not getting a clear understanding of how Israelis were experiencing the war,” Pinker told The Times of Israel. “I think that if you want to really understand what’s going on in the war, you have to understand how the main parties are experiencing it.”

The argument in the study is backed by a data analysis of New York Times articles on the war.

The study said 895 articles fit the dominant narrative, or 70% of those that described the conflict. Only half of those articles mentioned Israeli hostages in Gaza, and 41% did not mention Israel’s October 7 casualties. In 234 of the articles, the Hamas attack was not mentioned, but only 28 did not mention violence by Israel.

Out of all 1,561 articles, the overwhelming majority, 1,423, did not mention Israeli casualties after October 7, or the deaths of Hamas combatants.

During the study’s time frame, from October 8, 2023, to June 7, 2024, Israel lost 364 soldiers, several thousand were wounded, and 34 civilians were killed in 794 attacks in Israel and the West Bank, the study said, citing data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data research group.

Pinker said he focused on this time frame because the volume of coverage had generated enough data to carry out a study focused on the fighting in Gaza, but later events that could have shifted the coverage, such as more intensive fighting on the northern border, had not happened yet.

The coverage also likely skewed readers’ perceptions of how Israelis view the war, the study said. In Israeli media, Israeli casualties receive prominent coverage, but are not often mentioned by the Times.

“The reporting does not give the reader a full understanding of how the war is being experienced by Israelis,” the study said.

The analysis found there were personal stories of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering an average of two out of every three days, while there were nine streaks of a week or longer that did not mention Israeli casualties after October 7.

The coverage also minimized Hamas’s responsibility for the war, and its continuation, since the October 7 attack, the study said. Only 10% of articles directly related to the fighting mentioned Hamas deaths and there were 10 streaks of a week or longer that did not mention Hamas casualties, likely giving the impression there were only Palestinian civilian casualties. Only 18% of articles focused on the war mentioned Palestinian violence after the Hamas attack.

Far more Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israel estimates that thousands of Hamas terrorists have been killed in the fighting.

Many of the mentions of Palestinian violence also downplayed the threat to Israeli civilians. A series of articles published during a 17-day period near the start of the war, for example, mentioned Palestinian rocket fire, but mostly in the context of the debate over the al-Ahli Hospital, which was hit by an errant Palestinian rocket, according to the IDF and independent investigations.

Only one article mentioned a rocket attack in another context, although hundreds of rockets were fired into Israel, injuring Israeli civilians 13 times during that period. Coverage of the northern border during the same period did not mention six incidents of Hezbollah rockets wounding Israeli civilians in the 25 articles on the fighting there.

“From The New York Times perspective, Israeli soldiers are mainly fighting civilians or shadows,” the study said.

Of the 1,561 articles, 93% mentioned Israel more often than Hamas. Overall, Israel was mentioned 27,205 times, compared to 8,499 times for Hamas — more than three times more often. For articles focused on fighting between Israel and Hezbollah or Iran, there was a similar imbalance. In all articles, Hezbollah was mentioned 878 times, and in those stories, Israel was mentioned 6,222 times.

“This imbalance in mentions diminishes the responsibility of Hamas for the war and the situation. It supports the view that all agency is in the hands of Israel,” the study said.

Israelis who are not direct victims of October 7, but still suffer from the war — for example, widows whose partners were killed in Gaza, or those suffering economic damage from the conflict — were mentioned in only 52 out of 1,561 articles.

In January, former US secretary of state Antony Blinken called the lack of coverage of Hamas “astounding” in an interview with The New York Times — a statement the study tied to the newspaper’s own coverage.

“You hear virtually nothing from anyone since October 7 about Hamas,” Blinken said. “Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender?”

In response to the study, The New York Times said on Friday that it has published more than 13,000 stories, photos and videos that “offered readers rich context, confronting truths, and horrific human stories as we followed the facts.”

“The New York Times has covered this war with more rigor than virtually any other US news organization, reporting on the conflict from all angles,” a spokesperson told The Times of Israel, noting that the newspaper has covered both “previously unknown details about the atrocities committed by Hamas” and the “ferocious military campaign led by the Israeli government.”

“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,” the 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.”

The study noted there were aspects of coverage it did not address, for example, the Times’ use of photographs, how headlines match articles, and editorials.