In February of 2024, about 5 months into the Gaza genocide, CNN reported that 30,000 Palestinians had been killed, while the death toll in Israel was about 1200. In other words, 25 times more Palestinians had been killed than Israelis.
What’s even more horrifying is the stunning numbers of Palestinian children killed. As of March 2024, 12,300 Gazan children had been killed, a number that represented more deaths than all the children killed in all wars worldwide for the prior four years.
In spite of this grossly disproportionate carnage, which has only continued to grow, the Pew Research Center reported around this time that half of Americans didn’t know whether Palestinians or Israelis had suffered a higher death toll.
In this section we try to explain how Americans can be so oblivious to the massive asymmetry in the death toll between Palestinians and Israelis, a war funded in large part by the US government.
Noura Erakat, Palestinian lawyer and academic, speaking in 2021, describes media bias.
..headlines have always run the killing of Palestinians in the passive voice as if it were a natural disaster and not Israeli air strikes and not targeting of Palestinians. Amnesty International showed in 2014 that Israelis struck inhabited Palestinian homes. They were not collateral damage. They were targeted. No one was held to account.
How the media reports on events can greatly influence public perceptions of what is really going on.
Natalie Khazaal, Associate Professor of Arabic and Arab Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology describes decades of anti-Palestinian bias in the US Media, noting several types of bias including 1) selective coverage, 2) the down-playing of Palestinian suffering through reduced frequency and language used, 3) the rationalizing of Israeli violence, while depicting Palestinian violence as barbaric and senseless, 4) the obfuscation of historical context, and 5) the favoring of Israeli sources over Palestinian sources.
In February 2024, The Guardian also reported that CNN was facing backlash from its own staff decrying management edicts that led to systematic and institutional bias.
‘Every action by Israel – dropping massive bombs that wipe out entire streets, its obliteration of whole families – the coverage ends up massaged to create a ‘they had it coming’ narrative,’ said one staffer.
The Intercept, meanwhile, conducted a quantitative analysis of reporting from the six weeks following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks and found that
Major U.S. newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7.
The newspaper has instructed journalists to restrict use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to avoid the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land… they have told journalists not to use the term ‘Palestine’ except in very rare cases… reporters should not use the term ‘refugee camps’ to describe areas of Gaza where displaced Palestinians are now being located after being expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli-Arab wars…If Israel have their civilians killed it’s a massacre, it’s a slaughter, but if Palestinians do then it’s just collateral damage or a justified military attack…
