Ed Morrissey writes for HotAir.com about a major media outlet’s clear bias in its Middle East coverage. He asks in a headline: “Has Anyone Noticed That Criticism of Hamas Has Vanished In the NY Times?”
The answer to that is yes … in Israel, anyway. In a war started by Hamas with a grotesque massacre and pillaging of southern Israel, the New York Times has spent more time criticizing the victim rather than the perp. We know that thanks to an analysis conducted by Lilac Sigan for the Jerusalem Post, who researched the stories featured by the ‘Paper of Record’ in its newsletters since the start of the war.
Sigan found the coverage fairly balanced … for the first week of the war. After Israel launched its ground operations in Gaza, however, criticism of Hamas shrunk dramatically in comparison to that of Israel — and disappeared altogether about two months ago. …
… What did Sigan find? To no one’s great astonishment — certainly not to that of our readers — the NYT heavily tilted its sympathies to one side. And guess which side that was?
Out of a total of 1,398 articles, 647 expressed empathy only towards Palestinians (46.2% of the articles). 147 articles expressed empathy only towards Israelis (10.5% of the articles), and 50 articles expressed empathy only towards the hostages (2.9% of the articles). Thus, summarizing the entire period, one can say that the Palestinians received 4.4 times more empathy than the Israelis and hostages combined.
But that not all she found. The distribution percentage changed over time as well:
Starting from January, as mentioned, empathy towards Israelis and the hostages dropped until it almost completely disappeared. It was expressed in 16 articles in January, 10 articles in February, 9 in March, and 7 in April. Among hundreds of articles expressing significant empathy towards Palestinians (63 in January, 72 in February, 76 in March, 100 in April), it is possible to mistakenly conclude that Israelis are not significantly suffering from the war.