‘NYT’ coverage framed Israel as ‘sole aggressor,’ Palestinians as ‘passive victims,’ study finds

SEPTEMBER 14, 2026 17:46The New York Times’ reporting after October 7 consistently portrayed Palestinians as “passive victims” and Israel as the “sole aggressor,” a new peer-reviewed study by Edieal Pinker of Yale School of Management found.The study, How The New York Times Framed the War Between Israel and Hamas, was published in the academic journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism last week. It is an expansion of an initial quantitative study published by Pinker in February 2025, as covered by The Jerusalem Post at the time.Drawing on a body of 1,559 news articles written between October 7, 2023, and 7 June, 2024, Pinker documents a dominant narrative that assigned “near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel while diminishing Hamas’s role in sustaining the conflict.”According to Pinker, in this narrative, from October 8, 2023, onward, Israel “has been the sole aggressor” whereas Palestinians are portrayed as “passive victims whose suffering grows daily as they are relentlessly attacked by the Israeli military.”Pinker at no point makes the claim that the NYT is “biased” in its reporting. “To determine if bias exists one needs a benchmark of what “unbiased” reporting would look like,” he notes.Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar holds up a copy of The New York Times as he speaks during a United Nations Security Council meeting at the United Nations headquarters on in New York City on August 5, 2025. (credit: MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO/GETTY IMAGES)Rather, he says, he intends to document several imbalances in the reporting of the war that could “plausibly influence the opinions of a reader in a direction that is at odds with reality.”Details of the study reveal that most articles conform to 'dominant narrative'Of the 1,559 articles examined, Pinker concludes that 969, or about 70%, fit what he calls the “dominant narrative.”Pinker says the NYT frequently did not mention Israelis killed after October 7, Hamas fighters killed during the fighting, or Hamas or other Palestinian attacks carried out after October 7.In many cases, mention of Israeli hostages was also omitted. In fact, he finds that only 42% of those 969 articles mentioned the Israeli hostages, even though the hostages were central to ceasefire negotiations. Fifty-five percent did not mention the Israeli deaths on October 7 or at all.Pinker also reports that Israeli violence was almost always mentioned in these articles, while the Hamas attack itself was omitted on many occasions. There were only 38 cases in which Israeli violence was absent, compared with 237 in which the Hamas attack was absent.“Taken as a whole, this narrative reinforces a distorted view of the conflict, namely that Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing many Israelis, and this led to Israeli violence that has been killing only Palestinian civilians since then with no further Israeli deaths,” he writes.Pinker also opines that the absence of mention of Israeli casualties, including soldiers, in much of the NYT’s reporting “creates the appearance of a hierarchy of human life that is perhaps linked to degree of victimhood.”This framing is also at odds with how Israelis view the war, he adds.For example, in his 244-day sample, 128 days had at least one IDF death. Most of these made front page news in Israel. In comparison, in the NYT, there were only 74 days with a mention of Israeli casualties post-October 7 (including both military and civilian mentions). There were also nine stretches of a week or longer with no mention of Israeli military casualties.What a reader therefore may not understand is how costly the war was in terms of Israeli lives and the impact the war had on the wider society.“For The New York Times reader, the cost that Israelis are bearing will not be salient,” Pinker writes. “Given their sensitivity to casualties, the Israeli public expects its military and political leadership to conduct the war in a manner that reduces risk to their soldiers. This approach will inevitably lead to greater civilian deaths among the Palestinians. This context is lost to the reader of The New York Times.”Diminishing Hamas's responsibility for the warPinker also explores assignment of responsibility.One way in which he does this is by counting mentions of “Hamas” vs. mentions of “Israel.”Of the 1,559 articles in the sample, there are only 105 (7%) in which the number of times the word “Hamas” appears is greater than or equal to the number of times the word “Israel” appears.In total, the word “Israel” appears 27,205 times vs 8,499 for “Hamas” across all articles in the analysis. Pinker writes that this imbalance in mentions diminishes Hamas's responsibility for the war and the situation. He also says it supports the view that all agency is in the hands of Israel and thus most blame should fall on Israel for negative sentiment about the war.Regarding the balance of suffering, Pinker says that Palestinian suffering was mentioned in the large majority of articles about the war, whereas less than 4% of articles made any reference to some dimension of Israeli suffering among the population not in reference to direct victims of October 7.Again, he explains that this reinforces the view that Israelis incurred little cost from the war.Overall, Pinker concludes, there were imbalances in the NYT’s reporting post-October 7 that created a specific framing of the war.These imbalances have created sympathy for the Palestinian people while at the same time diminishing Hamas’ responsibility for their situation and the continuation of the war, he writes.When Pinker published his initial findings last year, The New York Times issued a statement saying that it has “covered this war with more rigor than virtually any other US news organization, reporting on the conflict from all angles.”It added, “We remain open to good-faith disagreement but will not change our coverage to buttress entrenched perspectives.”Follow us on Google