In numbers: How UK right-wing media’s pro-Israel Gaza war coverage dehumanises Palestinians

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Analysis: The New Arab’s research reveals how the UK media’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza is a case study in dehumanisation and warmongering.

For five months, global media attention has fixated on Israel’s assault on Gaza. Across the Western world, protests against Israel’s war have sharply criticised Western media reporting on Gaza.

British mainstream media coverage of the war has shown a consistent and profound bias against Palestinians from the country’s major conservative-leaning newspapers, according to a study by The New Arab.

Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis, The New Arab examined hundreds of headlines from The Times, The Telegraph, The Sun and the Daily Mail, four of the most widely read newspapers in the UK, which play a significant role in shaping public opinion. The Sun alone has approximately 30 million readers per month.

For this research, The New Arab collected all available online articles published by The Times (112), The Telegraph (106), The Sun (114) and the Daily Mail (285) between 7th October 2023 and 7th February 2024 on Gaza and Israel, for a total of 617 pieces. The headlines of these articles were then analysed for bias using three tests.

“This case study on dehumanising and negligent journalism confirms a widespread and systematic bias across much of the UK’s mainstream media, an issue Palestinians have asserted for years”

The results show that all four newspapers disproportionately favour Israeli lives and government narratives over Palestinian ones. More specifically, in their headlines, all four sources exhibit bias against Palestinians in the following three ways: uniquely deploying a vast amount of emotive language when describing Israeli suffering, amplifying Israeli justifications for violence, and qualifying Palestinian deaths.

This case studyconfirms a widespread and systematic bias across much of the UK’s mainstream media, an issue Palestinians have asserted for years as dehumanising and negligent journalism towards them– and a trend that is consistent with other analyses into Western media coverage of Israel-Palestine.

“These [new] findings are both shocking and unsurprising,” said Omar Al-Ghazzi, professor of media and communications at the London School of Economics. “A lot of people who care about being informed of what’s happening in this war have stopped getting their news from British sources,” he added.

The implications of this failure in UK journalism cannot be understated. During the period of analysis, more than 27,000 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israel. Today, the death toll is over 33,000 and rapidly rising, as millions face starvation.

In-depth

Abeer Al-Najjar

Creating angels and demons

The New Arab’s first analysis involved a quantitative keyword search that compared the use of 35 emotive nouns, verbs and adjectives. These included graphic and demonising language, such as ‘massacre’, ‘slaughter’, ‘barbaric’, ‘monster’ and ‘terrorist’, as well as humanising and compassionate language, such as ‘heartbreaking’, ‘loved ones’ and ‘babies’.

To select these 35 words, The New Arab looked at which terms were used most frequently across the headlines analysed.

Of the 617 headlines, 44% contained one or more of the 35 emotive words when referring to Israeli victims of Hamas violence. By contrast, just 7.5% did the same when discussing Palestinian victims of Israeli violence.

Across these headlines, The New Arab also found 645 instances of emotive words used to describe Israeli victims of Hamas violence, but just 57 for Palestinian victims of Israeli violence.