Yale Study: New York Times Coverage of War in Israel Has Been Pro-Hamas

By Joel B. Pollak(Breitbart)

A new academic study of New York Times coverage of the war in Israel launched by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023, published by a professor at Yale University has concluded that the newspaper is guilty of pro-Hamas bias.

The study was published by Edieal J. Pinker of the Yale School of Management, and is titled “An Analysis of the New York Times Coverage of the War Between Israel and Hamas.” The abstract says (original emphasis):

I conduct a quantitative analysis of the text of 1,561 New York Times articles published from October 7, 2023 to June 7, 2024 that reference both “Israel” and “Gaza” to assess whether there are imbalances in the coverage that have a potential to influence readers opinions about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in a systematic way. I find that there is a dominant narrative of the war that contextualizes many of the articles. In this narrative, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023, killing 1200 Israelis, and Israel’s military response has killed X thousand Palestinians with X increasing over time. Little mention is made of Israeli casualties post-October 7 or of Palestinian acts of violence post-October 7, even as Israel and Hamas were locked in intensive combat over the eight months of the study period. In fact, “Israel” is mentioned more than three times as often as “Hamas”. Personal stories of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering appear an average of two out of every three days while it is common to go a week at a time without a single mention of IDF deaths even when such deaths were frequent. I argue that the net result of these imbalances and others 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.

The Jerusalem Post adds:

Pinker’s study dismisses the argument that the reason “Israel” appears more is because the Jewish State has “more independence than the Palestinians and thus will have more freedom of action.”

If this were to be the case, he argued, there would be less of an imbalance in the ratio of mentions of Hezbollah and Iran. However, the data indicated the imbalance was the same.

Furthermore, while personal stories of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering are generally featured on two out of every three days, “it is common to go a week at a time without a single mention of IDF deaths even when such deaths were frequent.”

The analysis is just the latest study of pro-Hamas bias in mainstream media outlets. The BBC, for example, has been faulted for pro-Hamas bias and for violating its own editorial standards over 1,500 times. (The BBC claimed that the study reaching these conclusions was itself biased.)

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.