US media is systematically biased in favour of Israel, an analysis by The Intercept has uncovered. Investigation of more than 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV segments found mainstream US coverage was “one-sided, racist and dehumanising”, helping Israel justify its genocide in Gaza.
The investigation, published this week and drawn from research for a forthcoming book, examined more than 12,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN.com, Politico, Axios, USA Today and The Associated Press, alongside 5,000 television segments aired on CNN and MSNBC.
The focus is on centre-left outlets influential with the Biden administration during the first year of Israel’s assault on the besieged Gaza Strip.
The analysis identifies seven recurring patterns that, taken together, document the US media’s role in selling Israel’s narrative to the American public as the death toll in Gaza mounted into the tens of thousands.
Chief among the findings is the near-exclusive application of the phrase “right to defend itself” to Israel. On CNN and MSNBC, anchors, reporters and guests invoked the right to self-defence for Israel 94 times more often than for Palestinians, the analysis found. In print, Israel was afforded the same right more than 100 times as frequently.
The report also documents how the term “human shields” — a designation rejected by leading human rights organisations when applied to guerrilla forces operating near civilians — was used hundreds of times to describe Palestinian fighters, implicitly rationalising the killing of civilians in Israeli strikes. By contrast, the surveyed television coverage contained no references at all to the Israeli military’s own documented use of human shields, despite cases that meet the legal definition.
Emotive language was applied with similar partiality. Over a 100-day period in which roughly 24,000 Palestinians were killed, words such as “massacre”, “barbaric”, “savage” and “slaughter”, when used in outlets’ own editorial voice, were deployed “entirely in favour of Israel”, the analysis states.
The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
Following Israel’s bombing of al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City on 17 October 2023, US outlets rapidly adopted the qualifiers “Hamas-run” and “Hamas-controlled” when citing Palestinian casualty figures, a framing the report says functioned to discredit the death toll. Neither CNN nor MSNBC used the phrase in the first ten days of the assault; its use then climbed sharply, even as the US State Department, the World Health Organization and Human Rights Watch continued to treat figures from the Gaza Health Ministry as reliable.
The analysis further finds that victims likely to elicit public sympathy — journalists and children — received markedly less coverage during the first 100 days of Israel’s assault on Gaza than their counterparts in Ukraine had received in the equivalent early phase of Russia’s war.
Coverage of rising hate crimes in the same period focused almost entirely on anti-Semitism, with little attention paid to documented Islamophobia or to the impact of the killing in Gaza on Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities in the US.
Perhaps the starkest example, the report says, is the contrast between the New York Times’s treatment of the resignation of Harvard University’s former president Claudine Gay and its coverage of the killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab, who was left to die in a vehicle alongside her family after coming under Israeli fire in Gaza.
