We Ran the Numbers – Here’s How Britain’s Progressive Newspapers Have Covered Gaza

Although criticism of the western media’s coverage of Palestine, and the Middle East more generally, is far from new, accusations of systematic bias have increased sharply in the aftermath of 7 October. Much of the condemnation has focused on self-styled progressive outlets: in the US, the New York Times, whose exposé of sexual violence committed by Hamas during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was itself exposed as poorly evidenced; in the UK, outlets like the Guardian, whose editors have pulled their punches for fear of upsetting pro-Israel stakeholders.

To test whether these accusations of bias are generalisable beyond a set of isolated incidents, and to complement our previous analysis of four rightwing UK newspapers, we conducted a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of three prominent left-leaning newspapers: the Guardian, the Independent and the Mirror, outlets with a combined 88 million readers per month.

Novara Media collected all available online articles about the war on Gaza from the Guardian (459), the Independent (452) and the Mirror (257) published between 7 October 2023 and 7 March 2024. These headlines were then analysed using four tests to compare how the papers covered Israelis and Palestinians involved in the war: we tested how much emotive language they use; how many case studies of Israeli and Palestinian people they published; how often they referred to Israelis held hostage by Hamas and Palestinians unlawfully imprisoned by Israel; and how they reported Israeli and Palestinian deaths.

Our analysis reveals that in a war that has seen Israel kill over 39,000 Palestinians, all three publications favoured Israeli lives, narratives and voices, albeit to varying degrees. Across the four tests, the Mirror and Independent were consistently biased against Palestinians. The Guardian’s headlines were much more nuanced and balanced but still gave disproportionate coverage to Israelis.

“Novara Media’s findings confirm what many have suspected or shown, that even leftwing Western media outlets give preference to the Israeli narrative and talking points,” said Faisal Hanif, media analyst at the Centre for Media Monitoring and author of the report Media Bias Gaza.

“[The findings] raise questions as far as the mainstream western media is concerned,” he added. “Are the lives of Israelis more precious than those of Palestinians?”

Emotive language.

Novara Media compared the use of 28 emotive nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs across the 1,168 articles, and how often they were used in relation to Palestinian and Israeli victims of the war.

These included graphic and condemnatory language such as “massacre”, “slaughter”, “murder” and “terrorist”, as well as humanising and compassionate language, such as “heartbreaking”, “loved ones”, “babies” and “mothers”.

Across the 1,168 headlines from the Guardian, the Independent and the Mirror, one in five (19%) used emotive language to describe Israeli victims of Palestinian violence, while only 11.8% of the headlines did the same for Palestinian victims of Israeli violence.

That said, there were stark differences across the three outlets. While the Independent and the Mirror had double the number of headlines with emotive language for Israeli victims over Palestinian victims (22% v 10% and 33.4% v 18.6% respectively), the Guardian showed more balance, with 9.5% of its headlines using emotive language for Palestinians versus 7.8% for Israelis. However, given the vastly greater number of Palestinian victims of the war, one may question whether these figures are proportionate.

Novara Media also found a significant disparity in the variety of emotive language used to describe Israelis versus Palestinians, with all three newspapers using a more diverse spread of humanising and graphic language when talking about Israeli victims of Hamas violence compared to Palestinian victims of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

For example, across the Independent’s 452 headlines, Hamas’s violence against Israelis was graphically described as “Nazi”, “massacre”, “monstrous”, “bloody”, “heartbreaking”, “horror”, “rape”, “harrowing”, “murder”, “kidnapped”, “savagery”, “terrorist”, “agony”, “killing” and a “nightmare”, while Israeli violence against Palestinians was described using a far more limited vocabulary: “bloody”, “genocide”, “torture”, “nightmare” and “killed”.

Across all three publications, the emotive language that was most commonly used to humanise Palestinians was largely matter-of-fact, such as “mothers”, “children” and “loved ones”.

The publications’ hesitation to deploy graphic or hard-hitting language to describe Israeli violence was also reflected by the fact that, across the 1,168 articles analysed, just 18 headlines used the words “genocide”, “apartheid” or “nakba” – with the Guardian running nine of those, the Independent seven, and the Mirror two.

“This is concerning but not shocking, given that the overall approach of Western media has been to anchor events on 7 October in order to explain what has come after,” said Nasif.

Downplaying Israeli violence and atrocity against the Palestinians is, arguably, linked to Western media’s tendency to trust Israeli sources over Palestinian ones. For example, across the 1,168 articles analysed, Novara Media found 24 that included the words “Israel says” or “IDF says” and just five that included “Hamas says”.

Case studies.

The second test analysed how often headlines from the three publications highlighted the plight of a specific person or group of people as a case study, such as this headline from the Mirror: “Emily Hand, 9, enjoys beach walk with dad after Hamas hostage ordeal”. Case studies provide a perspective beyond facts and figures, inviting the reader to relate to or identify with the subject.

Novara Media’s analysis shows that the Independent and the Mirror share a stark pro-Israel bias, publishing far more case studies about Israelis than Palestinians. The Independent published 70 case studies about Israelis and just 28 about Palestinians; in the case of the Mirror, these figures were 89 and 31 respectively.

In the case of the Guardian, the situation was reversed. The paper featured 46 case studies about Israelis and 92 case studies about Palestinians, exactly twice as many. This is in large part due to the paper’s Gaza diary, which consisted of 48 articles by Ziad, a Palestinian man in Gaza sharing his life in the first four months of the war.

This Guardian series is a rare example of consistent humanising coverage of Palestinians in British mainstream media, amplifying Gazan voices on the ground.

“Publishers like the Guardian have hosted articles which have attempted to provide balance and raise vital points to consider, and this should be commended as it comes in an atmosphere where anything critical of Israel is met with fury and a call for people to be cancelled and censored,” said Hanif.

Hostages and prisoners.

Over 200 Israeli hostages were taken by Hamas on 7 October. Since then, Israel has unlawfully detained thousands of Palestinians and kept them in prison or “administrative detention” for months without charge, according to Human Rights Watch.

Israel currently holds some 9,000 Palestinian prisoners. This figure does not include the more than 4,000 detainees from the Gaza Strip captured by the Israeli military since the start of the war, often in torturous and inhumane conditions. Negotiating the release of Palestinian prisoners was the primary stated aim of Hamas’ 7 October attack.

Novara Media assessed and compared the number of headlines that focused on Israeli hostages or Palestinian prisoners.

The results were stark: the Independent and the Mirror published just one headline each about Palestinian prisoners during this period, compared to 70 and 24 headlines about Israeli hostages respectively. Meanwhile, the Guardian published 47 headlines about Israeli hostages and just seven on Palestinian prisoners.

Reporting deaths.

The final test analysed how each of the outlets reported on Israeli and Palestinian deaths. To do this, it asked two questions. Firstly, is active language used equally to discuss Israeli and Palestinian deaths? And secondly: is blame attributed equally to Israeli and Palestinians deaths?

To determine this, Novara Media filtered through all the headlines to find those that explicitly mentioned death counts or fatalities. The Guardian and Independent both had more headlines mentioning Palestinian deaths than Israeli ones, which is to be expected given the much larger death toll. In the case of the Mirror, this was reversed: the paper published 65 headlines mentioning Israeli deaths and just 52 headlines about Palestinian deaths.

Within these headlines, both the Guardian and the Independent used active language to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths at an equal rate (around 57% of the headlines).

On the other hand, 74% of the Mirror’s headlines about Israeli deaths used active language compared to 65% of headlines about Palestinian deaths. Examples of active language include the Guardian headline “Israeli airstrikes kill at least 100 as calls grow for Gaza ceasefire and hostage talks”, which specifies that Palestinians were deliberately killed, and this Daily Mirror headline using the active word “slaughter”: “Brit mum and two teen daughters found ‘cuddled together’ after being slaughtered by Hamas”.

In all three outlets, the type of active language used to describe deaths differed depending on the nationality of the victim. Harder-hitting language like “massacred”, “murdered” and “slaughtered” was almost exclusively reserved for Israelis. Palestinians were described as “killed”, with only a few exceptions.

When it comes to attributing blame, all three outlets were more likely to identify a perpetrator of violence when discussing Israeli deaths compared to Palestinian ones. In other words, all three publications explicitly linked Israeli deaths to Hamas more frequently than Palestinian deaths to Israel or the IDF.

The Guardian attributed blame for Israeli deaths in 62% of headlines compared to 50% for Palestinian deaths. In the Independent, the discrepancy was 72% versus 58%. Once again, the Daily Mirror displayed the most prominent pro-Israel bias, with 86% of headlines attributing blame for Israeli deaths compared to a mere 38% for Palestinian deaths.

Conclusion.

This research corroborates a litany of studies of western media coverage of Palestine over several decades.

All three publications we reviewed exhibited a bias towards Israel by using emotive language and case studies to humanise Israeli victims against graphic Palestinian violence. While doing so, all three failed to provide vital context – namely Israel’s ongoing occupation, ethnic cleansing and system of apartheid – for the events of 7 October, or to clearly attribute Palestinian deaths to Israeli violence.

That said, while the Independent and the Mirror consistently favoured Israelis across all four of this study’s tests, the Guardian’s coverage displayed more balance.

Although the level of bias found in these left-leaning British newspapers pales in comparison to Britain’s rightwing media, this study confirms that, across the political spectrum, British audiences are receiving highly skewed coverage of an ongoing genocide.

Commenting on Novara Media’s findings, Tom Chivers, a researcher for the Media Reform Coalition, said: “If our newspapers fail to address their biases and imbalances as exposed by this study, then the press will continue to fail the public in its basic duty to report the news truthfully and without fear or favour.”