- Western media created misleading public story that makes Palestinians seem less human and paints Israeli violence against occupied, trapped people as just self-defense
ISTANBUL
Western coverage of Palestine remains structurally biased, according to a study by Media Bias Meter, a project of tech professionals working on the ongoing crisis in Gaza and across Palestine.
Researchers analyzed the text of 54,449 articles published between Oct. 7, 2023, and August 2025 across eight major Western news outlets: BBC, The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, De Telegraaf, La Libre Belgique, The Globe and Mail, and Corriere della Sera.
The report concluded that Palestinians experience the ongoing occupation, mass displacement, and historical grievances, which are routinely downplayed or omitted, while Israeli narratives dominate.
Headline disparities
The study shows that headlines “overwhelmingly” focused on the Israeli perspective.
“At The New York Times, Israel is mentioned 186 times for every single reference to Palestine,” the researchers said, adding that the outlet used the word “Palestine” only 10 times since October 2023.
Out of 91 BBC headlines with the word Palestine, 80 are about Palestine Action, Pro-Palestine protests, or Free Palestine graffiti, which are usually framed as “violent and dangerous”; only 11 are actually about Palestine itself.
The researchers also found an imbalance in combined mentions in headlines about two countries.
According to the analysis, The Globe and Mail cited Israel 33 times for every single mention of Palestine.
The context of mentions about the two countries also matters. While Palestinians are represented as those facing displacement, siege, and mass civilian casualties, Israelis are shown as authoritative.
Erasure of the occupation
The study found that most outlets avoid using “illegal” or “in violation of international law” while reporting on the Israeli settlers or settlements.
The Corriere della Sera refers to settlers or settlements 53 times without a legal context for every instance where the term “illegal” is used.
In headlines across outlets, the word “occupied” appeared just 29 times compared to 1,180 references to the same territories without any acknowledgment of occupation.
“The result is not accidental nuance, but a systematic sanitization of violations under international law: one that obscures both the illegality of the settlements and their material consequences for Palestinians,” according to analytics.
While reporting the Palestinian refugee crisis, references to the “right of return” are almost nonexistent in major outlets, with only 38 mentions among 8 outlets.
“While Jewish return to Israel, 'Aliyah' is celebrated as sacred, and Ukrainian return is a moral duty. Palestinian return, by contrast, is treated as dangerous, destabilizing, or even anti-Semitic to mention,” said the study.
Historical context and right to exist
The researchers underlined that outlets routinely cite the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks to justify Israeli actions, while the illegal Israeli blockade in 2007 and its impact on the daily life of Palestinians are omitted.
According to the study, the Corriere della Sera referred to Oct. 7 215 times for every one reference to the 2007 blockade.
The analysis also showed that the term Nakba (which refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war) was used across outlets with limited empathy and, at times, revisionist or dismissive framing.
The least coverage and the most overtly revisionist framing were offered by De Telegraaf, with only 21 mentions of the word Nakba in the body and zero mentions in the headlines.
“Beyond the brief references to Nakba Day commemorations in the Netherlands, its articles portrayed the colonial invasion as a consequence of Arab aggression or Palestinian irresponsibility, recasting a historical tragedy as a narrative of self-inflicted victimhood,” said the research.
While the Israeli “Right to Exist” is treated as exclusive, the Palestinian existence is treated as conditional.
In Der Spiegel, Israel’s right to exist was affirmed far more frequently than Palestine’s -- 256 to 11.
“When one group’s existence is routinely defended while another’s is almost never acknowledged, the implication is glaring: One people is treated as a nation with rights. The other is a problem, with no legal or moral legitimacy to exist,” the researchers said.
Palestinian and Israeli portraits
The dominant frame through which Palestinians were portrayed was that of “terrorism,” while mass starvation in Gaza was downplayed.
Terrorism-related terms were used thrice as often as famine-related terms by Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and De Telegraaf.
“Labeling a people as terrorists is one of the most powerful forms of dehumanization. It does more than condemn an act; it erases the humanity of those associated with it,” said the report, adding Le Monde 69% of coverage on Gaza is filtered through a counterterrorism lens.
When reporting on Israeli strikes, the Western media often frames the attacks as acts of self-defense, frequently using terms like “precision,” “targeted,” or “surgical” strikes despite the tens of thousands of civilian deaths.
All of this ends up creating a misleading public story that makes Palestinians seem less human and paints violence against an occupied, trapped Indigenous people as if it’s just self-defense.
“This distortion does more than misinform -- it shapes policy, dulls outrage, and normalizes injustice. It is not the bias of one newsroom, but an institutional condition of Western journalism that continues to obscure the reality of Palestinian suffering and the asymmetry of this war,” concluded the report.
