The world’s leading news organisations based their coverage of casualties from the war between Israel and Hamas on figures provided by Hamas via the Gaza Ministry of Health. This contributed to the number of people killed being systematically portrayed as civilians.
The study, Selective Sources, Scrutiny, and the Absence of Standards in Military Conflict Coverage, was written by Tatiana Glezer and published in the peer-reviewed journal *Digital Hate Review*. It analyses 1,378 articles published between March and June 2024 in eight major English-language media outlets: The New York Times, The Guardian, Associated Press, BBC, CNN, The Washington Post, Reuters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) – the very same outlets on which the regime-aligned Norwegian press largely relies.
– The media are constructing a narrative of an Israeli war against civilians
According to the recent study, the media cited figures from Gaza’s Ministry of Health in 100 – one hundred – per cent of the articles that mentioned casualty figures. Israeli figures, including the IDF’s estimates of jihadists killed, were only referred to in around three per cent of the articles.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health does not distinguish between civilians and terrorists. Only 15 per cent of the articles mentioned that the figures lumped civilians and combatants together – and those articles came mainly from the Associated Press and the Washington Post. The ‘sources of truth’, the BBC and Reuters, almost never did so – in one to two per cent of the articles.
Information regarding the Ministry of Health’s links to Hamas was mentioned by the New York Times and the Washington Post in around two per cent of the articles.
The study concludes that this asymmetry shapes a particular narrative of the conflict – the total casualty figures are presented as civilian casualties by failing to distinguish between combatant jihadists:
– The patterns support a narrative that the total figure represents civilian deaths. Such portrayals help to shift the perception of the conflict from a war between a state and a terrorist organisation to a narrative of systematic attacks and killings of a civilian population – which shapes the public’s understanding of the war.
