‘Unbalanced’ New York Times Israel coverage reflects the parallel reality we now live in

In a development that will surprise precisely nobody, a study by a Yale researcher has established that coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict in The New York Times has been rather more favourable towards the jihadis than it should.

For the study, Edieal Pinker, a deputy dean at the Yale School of Management, examined 1,561 stories published by the paper between October 7 and June last year. The results, as they say, will shock you. Or rather, they won’t.

Are we supposed to be surprised that, according to his findings, half of the articles failed to mention the Israeli hostages in Gaza and 41 per cent glossed over the casualties of the October 7 pogroms? Indeed, a full 1,423 of the stories made no mention at all of the nearly 400 Israeli casualties that came thereafter, including the victims of terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank, according to Professor Pinker.

Did they mention the deaths of Hamas terrorists in the fighting? Did they heck. To be precise, just 10 per cent of reporting on the fighting acknowledged that jihadi combatants had been killed at all, while 18 per cent mentioned violence perpetrated by Palestinians after October 7, the research found. Israel, of course, was mentioned more than three times more frequently than Hamas in the articles studied.

In addition, The New York Times published heartrending personal accounts of Palestinian and Lebanese suffering almost every other day, while a rather lighter level of interest was evident in Israeli anguish.

“The net result of these imbalances and others,” Professor Pinker said, “is to create a depiction of events that is imbalanced toward creating sympathy for the Palestinian side, places most of the agency in the hands of Israel, is often at odds with actual events, and fails to give readers an understanding of how Israelis are experiencing the war.” Sound familiar?

It isn’t just The New York Times, of course. One of the reasons why newspaper websites like that of the Jewish Chronicle have become so popular after October 7 is that audiences increasingly feel that the “mainstream media”, as it has become known, is no longer a reliable source of impartial reporting.

For those living in Britain, the BBC is a particular bugbear. While it is true that the corporation is also under attack from the Palestinian side, with the Gaza marches insisting on demonstrating outside Broadcasting House in London, being criticised from both poles does not mean that you occupy the saintly centre ground, as BBC executives often intimate.

Rather, the lion’s share of legitimate condemnation highlights the broadcaster’s pro-Palestinian sympathies, while those accusing it of being too “Zionist” are generally wing-nuts advancing spurious arguments that reflect either their own radicalisation or a spittle-flecked desire to prevent the Jews from escaping the blast zone of hostile media propaganda.

One only needs to dip briefly into the poisoned well of BBC bias to bring up the most egregious examples. I’ll do it so you don’t have to, and bring up a sample at random: I find myself holding the report compiled back in September by Danny Cohen, former director of television at the Beeb, which accused the corporation of making “false and damaging claims about Israel’s conduct of this war” and producing “misleading broadcasts and social media output”.

This was not some piece of shoddy work produced by a hysteric.The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust all backed it, arguing in a joint statement that coverage has “led many British Jews to conclude that the BBC has become institutionally hostile to Israel”, while the Chief Rabbi called it “profoundly troubling”. That was almost six months ago. Has anything changed? I think not.

But, of course, it’s not just the BBC. Show me a publication or broadcaster of the left, whether CNN, The Guardian, Channel 4 or Haaretz — yes, even progressive Jews are at it — and I’ll show you rampant Israelophobia. The dezinformatsiya campaign launched by Cold War propagandists has become one of the most pernicious mind-viruses of our times, taking on a life of its own in our universities, media outlets and cultural institutions. Is it any surprise that when polled by Ipsos to mark the anniversary of October 7, the great British public was split down the middle on the question of whether Israel or Hamas was “most responsible” for the conflict?

In response to Professor Pinker’s study, a New York Times spokesman said: “Our editors make careful and deliberate choices about every story we publish to ensure our language, framing, prominence, and tone remain true to our mission of independent journalism. We remain open to good-faith disagreement but will not change our coverage to buttress entrenched perspectives. Our commitment is to independent reporting that our readers can trust.” Entrenched perspectives? Right. Sounds rather like victim blaming to me.

So we find ourselves living in a parallel reality. I wonder, sometimes, if I have slipped through a set of sliding doors and left behind a world in which a beleaguered and flawed liberal democracy fighting for its life against a gang of jihadi savages is supported rather than condemned. It is still possible to get glimpses of that saner world, at least in the pages of The Jewish Chronicle. The New York Times, however, remains in a darker universe.