A recent analysis by a Yale professor claimed The New York Times‘ coverage of the Gaza conflict downplayed Israeli losses after the Hamas terror group’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of the Jewish state and minimized the role of Palestinian violence in sustaining the war.

The findings have added fuel to ongoing debates about media bias in reporting on the war, with one prominent critic of the Times arguing that they fit with not only a long-standing pattern of portraying Israel as a belligerent aggressor but also a deep hostility toward the Jewish state among the newspaper’s top leadership.

The study — published last month and conducted by Edieal Pinker, a professor and deputy dean at the Yale School of Management — examined 1,561 articles published by the Times between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024. It concluded that the newspaper’s reporting adhered to a “specific narrative” in which Israel was largely portrayed as the primary aggressor while Palestinian suffering received dominant coverage.

“The net result of these imbalances and others is to create a depiction of events that is imbalanced toward creating sympathy for the Palestinian side, places most of the agency in the hands of Israel, is often at odds with actual events, and fails to give readers an understanding of how Israelis are experiencing the war,” Pinker said.

A Question of Emphasis

The study found that The New York Times devoted extensive coverage to Israeli actions in Gaza and their impact on Palestinian civilians, while making significantly fewer references to Israeli casualties, Hamas combatant losses, and Palestinian violence after Oct. 7. According to the data, 70 percent of articles that described the conflict fit this dominant narrative. Nearly half of these did not mention Israeli hostages held in Gaza, and 41 percent omitted any reference to the Israeli casualties from Hamas’s initial attack.

By contrast, Pinker’s analysis found that 1,423 of the 1,561 articles surveyed made no mention of Israeli casualties incurred after the initial Oct. 7 assault — in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages across southern Israel — nor of Hamas fighter deaths. The study cited data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data research group indicating that, during the study’s timeframe, Israel lost 364 soldiers, 34 civilians, and suffered hundreds of attacks in Israel and the West Bank during the ensuing war.

In addition, the Times published personal stories of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering nearly every other day, while there were far longer periods in which post-Oct. 7 Israeli casualties were not mentioned at all, according to the study.

The coverage also appeared to minimize Hamas’s role in perpetuating the war, the study claimed. Only 10 percent of articles directly related to the fighting acknowledged Hamas combatant deaths, and 18 percent of war-related articles mentioned Palestinian violence post-Oct. 7. By comparison, Israel was mentioned more than three times as often as Hamas across all articles focused on the war.

A Longstanding Narrative

Author and media critic Ashley Rindsberg, who has written extensively about The New York Times in his book The Gray Lady Winked, argued that the study’s findings are consistent with the newspaper’s historical coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The findings of the Yale study show that The New York Times is framing the current conflict in a way that’s very similar and almost a template to how it’s framed the Israel-Palestine conflict going back to the Second Intifada,” Rindsberg told The Algemeiner. “It was during the Intifada that The New York Times first created this narrative whereby Israel is almost always the sole aggressor and Palestinians are perpetual victims. Very rarely does the paper attempt to break this narrative and even suppresses facts or data that dissent from it.”

Rindsberg further argued that the Sulzberger family, which has controlled the newspaper for over a century, plays a role in shaping its editorial stance. “The Times holds onto this narrative at all costs,” he explained. “The Sulzbergers are almost genetically opposed to the concept of Judaism that underlies the state of Israel, which is an ethnic and national conception of the Jewish people, not just a religious faith. For them, Israel completely disrupts their worldview, and the result is a culture at the newspaper that supports this kind of narrative.”

The Challenge of Bias Measurement

Pinker, a dual US-Israeli citizen with a background in data analysis, emphasized that his research does not attempt to prove bias in the The New York Times‘ reporting, noting that bias is difficult to quantify statistically and would require analyzing journalistic intent.

Instead, the study aimed to assess whether imbalances in coverage could shape public perceptions in a way that diverges from the broader reality of the war. One potential contributing factor, the study noted, is the vastly different levels of press access between Israel and Gaza. Israel generally allows journalists to operate freely, whereas Hamas tightly controls reporting inside the enclave. This disparity could create unintentional biases, the study suggested.

It also did not examine the impact of other editorial decisions that could influence coverage, such as photo selection, headline framing, or the tone of opinion pieces.

New York Times Responds

The New York Times, which has frequently faced criticism from both supporters and opponents of Israel over its coverage, defended its reporting. In a statement responding to the study, a spokesperson said the newspaper had published over 13,000 articles, photos, and videos providing “rich context, confronting truths, and horrific human stories” about the war.

“The New York Times has covered this war with more rigor than virtually any other US news organization, reporting on the conflict from all angles,” the spokesperson said. They pointed to the paper’s investigations into Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, as well as its extensive reporting on Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

“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,” the statement continued. “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.”

In January, former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken commented on the lack of coverage of Hamas’s role in the war, calling it “astounding” in an interview with the Times.

“You hear virtually nothing from anyone since Oct. 7 about Hamas,” Blinken said at the time. “Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender?”

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