Israel Matzav: Study: NY Times seven times more likely to criticize Israel than 'Palestinians'

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Study: NY Times seven times more likely to criticize Israel than 'Palestinians'

A study done by CAMERA shows that the New York Times is seven times more likely to criticize Israel than to criticize the 'Palestinians' and twice as likely to publish opinion pieces that promote the 'Palestinian' narrative than the Israeli one.

The analysis, which examined staff columns and guest Op-Eds during the year period from Oct. 5, 2013 through Oct. 4, 2014, considers the 75 opinion pieces that focused on Israel or the Palestinians. Of those, 31 were either predominantly critical of Israel or sympathetic to Palestinians; 14 were either predominantly critical of Palestinians or sympathetic to Israel; the remaining 30 did not predominantly criticize or support one side over the other, although they often suggested a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas by criticizing both in roughly equal measure.

(While moral equations between Israel, a liberal democracy, and Hamas, an internationally designated terror organization, are often and understandable viewed as anti-Israel, for the purpose of this study articles that equate those two parties are considered neutral. However, articles that equate Hamas and Israel while casting the Palestinian Authority as the one reasonable, moderate party are categorized as primarily sympathetic to Palestinians/critical of Israelis.)

As tensions rose in Israel and Gaza, the lopsidedness became even more pronounced. From June 12, the day three Israeli teens were kidnapped and killed, through Aug. 26, when Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement, the newspaper published three times as many opinion pieces predominantly critical of Israel or sympathetic to Palestinians as those critical of Palestinians or sympathetic to Israel — 3 vs. 9.

In practice this means, for example, that after the murder of three Israeli Jewish teens and the subsequent murder of an Arab teen, readers were exposed to "A Mother's Fear in East Jerusalem," an emotional, first-person account by an Arab mother about her worries about her son's safety, which she used as a hook to argue that "the world must hold the Israeli government accountable for its actions"; but those same readers are left unexposed to the fears and feelings of Jewish mothers, even though it is them and their sons who most often are targeted in acts of murderous terrorism.

The discrepancy fits with the recent admission by a New York Times opinion editor that the newspaper chooses to shy away from scrutiny of Palestinians. Opinion editor Matt Seaton, who was commenting on Twitter about his department's decision to publish three Op-Eds alleging Israeli racism in three consecutive months, asserted that The Times does not intend to publish pieces about Palestinian racism until the Palestinians have a "sovereign state."

While none of this is shocking to anyone who follows the Times, the fact that studies like this one are nowhere to be found in the legacy media is mind-boggling.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: anti-Israel media bias, CAMERA, New York Times