The New York Times’ coverage of the Israel-Hamas war was grossly skewed toward the Palestinian side and against Israel, according to a peer-reviewed academic study. Israeli casualties were consistently omitted or minimized, while Palestinian suffering was amplified and given far greater prominence throughout.
The study’s author, Edieal Pinker, a professor at the Yale School of Management, published his findings in the academic journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism after the paper cleared formal peer review. Pinker’s research quantitatively evaluated 1,559 New York Times articles published between October 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024, coding each one across dozens of specific categories to assess whether the coverage carried a consistent narrative imbalance.
Pinker began by pulling every Times news article, through ProQuest, that mentioned both “Israel” and “Gaza” during that period, a total of 2,063 articles. After removing duplicate editions and articles unrelated to the war, he was left with his final corpus of 1,559. He read and tagged every one of them himself, then had three trained research assistants independently tag a sample to check his own tagging for reliability, reconciling any discrepancies by rereading the disputed articles. The measured agreement between coders, using a statistic called Cohen’s Kappa, ranged from the high 80s to high 90s percent by the end of that process, indicating unusually rigorous inter-rater reliability for this kind of content analysis.
The findings were stark. Ninety-one percent of the analyzed articles failed to mention any Israeli casualty that occurred after October 7. Of the full 1,559-article corpus, 1,412 articles omitted any mention of both Israeli post-October 7 casualties and Hamas combatant deaths together. Fifty percent of the articles did not reference the Israeli hostages Hamas was holding, and 41 percent omitted mentions of Israeli casualties from the October 7 attack itself, even as the hostages remained the central issue in every ceasefire negotiation of the war.
What Pinker found was a dominant narrative that repeated itself across 969 of the 1,559 articles, or 70 percent of those that described the war at all: Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing Israelis, and Israel’s military response has been killing Palestinians ever since, with no further Israeli losses along the way.
The real casualty figures make the gap concrete. Between October 8, 2023, and June 7, 2024, the Israel Defense Forces lost 364 soldiers, and 31 Israeli civilians were killed in 116 separate incidents out of more than 1,600 recorded Palestinian and Hezbollah attacks on Israel and the West Bank. Of the 244 days in Pinker’s sample, 128 saw at least one IDF death, with only two stretches of a week or longer without one. The Times, by contrast, mentioned Israeli casualties on only 74 of those 244 days, and went nine separate stretches of a week or longer without any mention of an Israeli military casualty at all. Only 11 percent of the articles focused most directly on the fighting itself mentioned an Israeli military casualty occurring after October 7.
The imbalance in personal storytelling was starker still. Personal stories highlighting Palestinian and Lebanese suffering appeared on average two out of every three days across the eight-month sample, and more than 36 percent of the Times’ most direct war coverage included a personal account of an individual Gazan’s struggle. Comparable personal accounts of Israeli suffering that were not tied directly to October 7 itself appeared in fewer than 4 percent of that same coverage, and only 52 articles in the entire 1,559-article corpus mentioned any dimension of Israeli suffering beyond the immediate victims of the October 7 attack and their families.
Pinker also counted raw mentions of each side’s name. The word “Israel” appeared 27,205 times across the dataset, compared to just 8,499 mentions of “Hamas,” meaning Israel was named more than three times as often. Only 105 of the 1,559 articles, roughly 7 percent, mentioned “Hamas” as often as or more often than “Israel.” To test whether this simply reflected Israel’s greater freedom of action as a sovereign state, Pinker ran the same comparison for Hezbollah and Iran, both of which also act with considerable independence. The same lopsided pattern held for both: “Israel” was mentioned far more often than “Hezbollah” in 95 percent of the articles in which Hezbollah appeared, and far more often than “Iran” in 88 percent of the articles in which Iran appeared.
One of the paper’s most concrete illustrations tracks the Times’ coverage of Hamas rocket fire on Israel in the war’s first weeks. Drawing on the independently compiled Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) database, Pinker counted 31 separate rocket incidents causing civilian injuries in Israel between October 8 and November 2, 2023. The Times mentioned Palestinian violence on 12 of those days, which on its face looks like reasonably close coverage. But reading the actual article text told a different story: only four of those days mentioned any Israeli casualty at all, and of the articles referencing rocket fire specifically, eleven mentioned it only in the context of the disputed Al-Ahli hospital explosion, which Israel attributed to a misfired Palestinian rocket. From October 17 through November 2, a period in which ACLED recorded 13 separate incidents of Israeli civilians being wounded by rocket fire, the Times published exactly one article referencing rocket damage or injuries in Israel that was not about the hospital dispute.
Pinker concluded that these consistent editorial choices cultivated a dominant narrative in which Israel is portrayed as the sole aggressor, facing no real cost from the war beyond the loss of international sympathy, while Palestinians are framed almost entirely as passive victims. He wrote that the resulting frame “assigns near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel while diminishing Hamas’s role in initiating and sustaining the conflict,” and argued that it deprives readers of any real understanding of the continuous nature of Israeli losses or the ongoing combat dynamics driving the war. He noted a January 2025 interview the Times itself conducted with outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in which Blinken said he found it “astounding” that “for all of the understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza, you hear virtually nothing from anyone since October 7 about Hamas,” and asked why there had never been “a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender.”
Pinker was careful, throughout the paper, not to overstate his own conclusions. He explicitly declines to call the Times’ coverage “biased,” noting that doing so would require an agreed benchmark for what unbiased coverage would look like, and that differences in journalists’ access to information, given Israel’s open society versus Hamas’s tightly controlled one, will unavoidably shape what gets reported regardless of anyone’s intent. He also engages directly with the existing academic literature claiming a pro-Israel bias in the Times, including a 2002 study on word choice and a Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting analysis of the term “retaliation,” and argues that both are less conclusive than their authors suggest.
The findings are landing amid renewed public attention. Israeli officials now put the IDF’s death toll at 437 soldiers since the war began, a figure that continues to climb well past the 364 recorded within Pinker’s original sample window, underscoring that the asymmetry he documented describes an ongoing pattern, not a snapshot that closed with his data collection in June 2024.
Following the initial release of the study, The New York Times publicly defended its reporting. “We have covered this war with more rigor than virtually any other US news organization, reporting on the conflict from all angles,” a spokesperson said. “Our editors make careful and deliberate choices about every story we publish to ensure our language, framing, prominence and tone remain true to our mission of independent journalism. We remain open to good-faith disagreement but will not change our coverage to buttress entrenched perspectives. Our commitment is to independent reporting that our readers can trust.”
Pinker is not a media studies specialist by training. He is the BearingPoint Professor of Operations Research at the Yale School of Management, holding a PhD in Operations Research from MIT and a mathematics degree from Columbia, and sits on the executive committee of Yale’s Jewish Studies Program, where he has previously applied quantitative methods to other questions of Jewish communal life, including demographic projections of the American Jewish population. His background is in building rigorous, reproducible measurement systems, not advocacy journalism criticism, which is part of why the paper leans so heavily on coding protocols and inter-rater reliability statistics rather than rhetorical argument.
The BBC: A Pattern of Editorial Breaches
Pinker’s findings on the Times are not an isolated case. A separate investigation into the BBC’s wartime coverage, led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, found what it called a “deeply worrying pattern of bias against Israel.” The Asserson study concluded that the broadcaster associated Israel with the word “genocide” fourteen times more often than it did Hamas, and found that the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times over the war’s first four months. The report also found that the BBC referred to Hamas as a terrorist organization in only 409 of 12,459 relevant mentions, or roughly 3.2 percent of the time, despite the United Kingdom’s own government proscribing Hamas as a terrorist organization in its entirety. The complaints are not new to this war. In 2012, the BBC’s own Middle East editor was reported to have circulated internal guidance urging staff to write more favorably about Israel and avoid placing “undue emphasis” on Israeli responsibility during that year’s Gaza offensive, an episode pro-Israel critics cite as evidence the network’s editorial hand has shaped coverage of the conflict for well over a decade.
The Casualty Numbers: Whose Figures Get Repeated
A third body of research, published in Middle East Quarterly by Andrew Fox of the Henry Jackson Society and Tatiana Glezer of the research group Fifty Global, examined how eight major outlets, including CNN, the BBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters and the Associated Press, reported on Gaza casualty figures between February and May 2024.
The study found that only 3 percent of the outlets sampled cited specific figures for combatant casualties, and that just 15 percent noted that Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in the casualty totals it releases. Hamas-supplied figures were cited in 100 percent of the publications sampled, while Israeli figures appeared in only 4 percent. Nearly half of the articles that cited Israel Defense Forces data flagged it as unverifiable; only 1 percent of the articles citing Hamas figures did the same, even though the United Nations’ own Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs states on its website that Hamas’s figures are “yet to be verified” by the UN.
The researchers also found that Israel has achieved one of the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios in modern warfare, roughly 1.4 to 1, compared to a ratio of roughly 2 to 3 in the Bosnian War and figures as high as 5 to 1 in the Iraq War, based on IDF estimates that more than 17,000 Hamas combatants were killed in the conflict, a figure the study says has been largely ignored in global reporting despite corroboration.
A Consistent Pattern
Three studies, three methodologies, three separate news organizations, and the same result each time. Hamas’s responsibility for starting and sustaining the war is minimized or omitted. Israeli losses, whether military casualties, the October 7 death toll or the hostages still being held, are underreported relative to Palestinian suffering. And when it comes to the casualty figures that drive the entire international debate over the war’s conduct, coverage overwhelmingly repeats numbers from a Hamas-controlled source without the scrutiny routinely applied to Israel’s own data.
None of the three studies claims to prove that individual reporters or editors set out to disadvantage Israel. What they establish, each in its own way, is that the resulting picture read by hundreds of millions of people has consistently tilted in one direction, regardless of the reasons behind it.
Commentary
The New York Times’ defense of its own reporting does not survive contact with Pinker’s numbers. “Reporting the conflict from all angles” is not compatible with a paper that failed to mention a single Israeli casualty in 91 percent of its own war coverage, went nine separate weeks without mentioning an Israeli soldier’s death at all, and gave readers a personal account of Palestinian suffering on two out of every three days while doing the same for Israeli suffering in fewer than one article in twenty. That is not rigor. It is a choice, sustained for eight straight months, and the paper has offered nothing but a press release in response to a peer-reviewed accounting of it.
This is also not new. The historian Laurel Leff documented in her book “Buried by the Times” how the paper minimized and buried its own coverage of the Holocaust while it was happening, a pattern she traces in part to the paper’s own Jewish publisher at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and his anxiety about the Times appearing to advocate for Jewish interests. Eighty years later, the Times is still finding ways to keep Jewish suffering off its pages, this time through omission rather than placement. A newspaper with that record does not get to explain away a fresh, peer-reviewed finding of the same pattern with a boilerplate statement about editorial rigor. Readers who want a fair account of this war should look elsewhere, and should not reward with their subscriptions a paper that has shown, twice now across eight decades, exactly whose suffering it is willing to leave out.
