Coverage of the Gaza war by The New York Times produced a narrative that assigned near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel while diminishing Hamas's role in sustaining the conflict, according to a peer-reviewed study published this month.
The study, by Edieal Pinker of the Yale School of Management, examined 1,559 Times news articles mentioning both Israel and Gaza published between October 7, 2023 and June 7, 2024, a span of 244 days. It appeared on September 7 in the journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism under the title "How the New York Times Framed the War Between Israel and Hamas."
Pinker found that the dominant narrative described Hamas's October 7 attack, followed by Israeli military action and mounting Palestinian casualties, while largely omitting Israeli casualties after October 7, Hamas fighter casualties, and post-October 7 Palestinian violence.
The imbalance he documents is sharpest in personal accounts. Stories of individual Palestinian suffering appeared on average two days out of every three, he found, while comparable accounts of Israeli suffering appeared in fewer than 4 percent of articles focused on events on the ground.
Drawing on Entman's framing theory and conflict resolution scholarship, Pinker argues these patterns are consistent with a frame in which Israel appears as the sole aggressor and Palestinians as passive victims. He makes a methodological point central to the argument: an individual article can contain entirely accurate facts while still contributing to a distorted cumulative picture, because what matters is what readers are repeatedly told and what they are not.
The same pattern, he wrote, applied to attacks in Judea and Samaria during the period studied, where Israeli victims received little coverage.
The Times rejected the findings. A spokesperson said the paper has covered the war with more rigor than virtually any other US news organization, reporting on the conflict from all angles. Editors make careful and deliberate choices about every story to ensure that language, framing, prominence and tone remain true to the paper's mission of independent journalism, the spokesperson said, adding that the Times remains open to good-faith disagreement but will not change its coverage to strengthen entrenched perspectives.
Pinker is the BearingPoint Professor of Operations Research at Yale SOM and served as deputy dean for strategy from 2016 to 2025. The paper is published as a Note, the journal's short-form format. An earlier version circulated as a working paper on SSRN before peer review.
If you want the sharper version, lead on the 4 percent figure rather than the framing language. It's the most concrete number in the study and the one readers will remember.
