A study analyzes tens of thousands of articles from Western media institutions during the Gaza war.

A study conducted by researchers at the Media Bias Index concluded that Western media coverage of the developments in the genocide war on the Gaza Strip remained biased, by promoting the Israeli narrative and ignoring or downplaying the scale of humanitarian tragedies in the region.

The researchers analyzed 54,449 articles published between October 7, 2023, and August 2025 in 8 major Western media outlets: the British BBC, the American New York Times, the French Le Monde, the German Der Spiegel, the British Daily Telegraph, the Belgian Le Soir, the Canadian Globe and Mail, and the Italian Corriere della Sera.

The study showed that the headlines of the articles heavily focused on the Israeli narrative, concluding that the New York Times mentioned Israel 186 times for every mention of Palestine, noting that the newspaper used the word "Palestine" only 10 times since October 2023.

Among 91 headlines in the BBC that contained the word Palestine, only 11 headlines referred to Palestine as a country; otherwise, Palestine was mentioned 80 times in contexts related to the British "Palestine Action" movement or pro-Palestinian protests, or writings on walls like "Free Palestine."

According to the analysis, the Canadian Globe and Mail mentioned Israel 33 times for every mention of Palestine.

The study found that most of the media outlets researched avoided using terms like "illegal" or "violating international law" when covering news about Israeli settlers or settlements.

The Italian Corriere della Sera referred to settlers or settlements in its reports 53 times without mentioning the legal context.

The word "occupied" appeared in the headlines of the media institutions included in the study only 29 times compared to 1,180 references to the same lands without any acknowledgment of the occupation.

According to Anadolu, Western media coverage was not merely biased but systematically whitewashed the violations committed under international law.

References to the "right of return" were almost nonexistent during the coverage of the Palestinian refugee crisis, with only 38 mentions across the eight media outlets.

While the media celebrated the "return of Jews to Israel" as sacred, and considered the return of Ukrainians to their homeland a moral duty, they viewed the return of Palestinians as a danger and a destabilizing factor, or even "anti-Semitic," according to the study.

The researchers confirmed that media institutions routinely cited the "Al-Aqsa Flood" operation on October 7, 2023, to justify Israeli crimes, while ignoring the illegal Israeli blockade since 2007 and its impact on the daily lives of Palestinians.

According to the study, Corriere della Sera referred to October 7, 215 times for every single reference to the Israeli blockade in 2007.

The analysis also concluded that the term "Nakba" (which refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians and their dispossession in 1948) was used in the media with limited sympathy, sometimes in a revisionist, skeptical, or denial context.

The Telegraph was the least media outlet to mention the word "Nakba" (21 times within the texts only, without headlines) and the most inclusive of the skeptical context.

According to the research, the "right of Israel to exist" was treated in Western news institutions as exclusive, while the existence of Palestinians was conditional.

The term "terrorism" was the prevailing and recurring framework for the media's perception of Palestinians, while the significance of the starvation in Gaza was downplayed.

Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and the Telegraph used terrorism-related terms three times more than terms related to famine, and 69% of Le Monde's coverage of Gaza was framed through a counter-terrorism perspective.

The researchers commented on the findings by stating, "Describing a people as terrorists is one of the strongest forms of dehumanization; it does not only condemn an act but erases the humanity of those associated with it."

When covering Israeli attacks, Western media often portrayed them as acts of self-defense, frequently using terms like "precise strikes," "targeted," or "surgical," despite the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.

The report concluded that the bias and distortion in the coverage of Western news institutions, through adopting the Israeli narrative, downplaying the suffering of Palestinians, and normalizing Israeli injustice as self-defense, did not originate from a single newsroom but embodied an institutional state of Western journalism.