Academic Study Proves the Obvious: The New York Times’ Anti-Israel Bias

There’s no love lost between the New York Post and The New York Times. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the Post has jumped on an academic study that reveals its local rival’s anti-Israel bias:

The New York Times’ coverage of the first months of the war in Gaza displayed a clear bias against Israel by downplaying the country’s casualties while minimizing Hamas’ role in sustaining the conflict, a new study found.

A review of the Times’ 1,559 articles published between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024, showed that the Times often omitted deaths sustained by the Jewish military while looking the other way on ongoing Palestinian violence once the war began after Hamas terrorists’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Edieal Pinker of the Yale School of Management, who published his findings in the Studies in Conflict & Terrorism academic journal, said the Times’ coverage was clearly skewed against Israel.

“Drawing on a corpus of 1,559 news articles I document a dominant narrative consistent with a framing that assigns near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel while diminishing Hamas’s role in sustaining the conflict,” Pinker wrote.

“It describes Hamas’s October 7 attack followed by Israeli military violence and mounting Palestinian casualties, while largely omitting Israeli casualties post-October 7, Hamas fighter casualties, and post-October 7 Palestinian violence.

“Personal accounts of Palestinian suffering appear two out of every three days, while comparable accounts of Israeli suffering rarely appear,” he said.

A total of 437 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the Jewish state began its offensive in Gaza, with dozens of police officers and civilians also killed and injured in terror attacks throughout the war, according to Israeli officials.

Pinker argued that the Times’ coverage ultimately portrayed Israel as the “sole aggressor” in the conflict while Palestinians were depicted as “passive victims.”

The Times rejected Pinker’s characterization of its reporting and had previously stated that it “has covered this war with more rigor than virtually any other US news organization, reporting on the conflict from all angles.

We’ve been calling out the NYT for its reporting for the past 25 years. And while academia isn’t always free from its own biases, this is one study we are more than happy to endorse.

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