Across decades of coverage, the major newspapers and broadcasters of the United States and United Kingdom have not merely failed Palestinian audiences — they have actively structured their language, sourcing, and editorial priorities to obscure Israeli military violence, suppress legally grounded terminology, and center Israeli narratives over Palestinian ones. This is not a matter of individual lapses. It is a documented, systemic pattern.
The evidence runs from leaked internal memos to suppressed institutional reports to quantified studies of word choice. It spans the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, Reuters, CNN, and nearly every major outlet that English-speaking audiences rely upon for their understanding of one of the world’s most consequential and longest-running military occupations.
The NYT Memo: Banning the Language of Accountability
In April 2024, the Intercept published a leaked internal memo from New York Times management instructing its reporters covering Gaza to restrict specific words and phrases. As FAIR reported, the memo told Times staff to avoid “Palestine” (“except in very rare cases”), “occupied territories” (substitute “Gaza, the West Bank, etc.”), and “refugee camps” (call them “neighborhoods, or areas”) FAIR.
These are not fringe or contested terms. “Palestine” is the name of a state recognized by the United Nations and 140 of its 193 members. “Occupied territories” is the language used by both the UN and the United States government. “Refugee camps” is what the UN agency administering the eight camps in Gaza calls them FAIR.
The memo, written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling and international editor Philip Pan along with their deputies, also discouraged use of “genocide” — instructing reporters to “set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not” — and flagged “ethnic cleansing” as “another historically charged term” FAIR.
At the same time, the memo declared it “accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of October 7,” while discouraging the use of “fighters” or “militants” for those same participants FAIR. This asymmetry is the point: the vocabulary of atrocity flows in one direction only.
A New York Times staffer, describing the effect of this guidance to the Intercept, said the paper was “basically taking the occupation out of the coverage, which is the actual core of the conflict” FAIR.
Suppressing Genocide — Until It Was Too Late
The consequences of the Times’ language restrictions were not merely stylistic. They were political.
More than a year after the memo was leaked, the Times published an op-ed by prominent Israeli genocide scholar Omer Bartov, concluding that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people” and that its actions “could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population” FAIR. Two weeks later, the opinion page ran a second op-ed by writers including two from Physicians for Human Rights Israel, arguing: “This is not a genocide that can still be prevented. That threshold has already been crossed” FAIR.
But these pieces arrived deep into a war that had already devastated Gaza. The question FAIR’s Ari Paul asks is why it took so long FAIR.
The voices calling for this framing had been present from the beginning. In October 2023, Israeli genocide scholar Raz Segal published “A Textbook Case of Genocide” in Jewish Currents, writing that “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open and unashamed” FAIR. Around 800 genocide scholars — including both Segal and Bartov — signed a public statement sounding “the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” FAIR. The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stated in November 2023 that Israeli actions “point to a genocide in the making” FAIR. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese stated in March 2024 that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide…has been met” FAIR.
Amnesty International, which the Times itself reported had “become the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza,” made that declaration in late 2024 FAIR. Christopher Lockyear, secretary general of Doctors Without Borders, stated: “What our medical teams have witnessed on the ground throughout this conflict is consistent with the descriptions provided by an increasing number of legal experts and organizations concluding that genocide is taking place in Gaza” FAIR.
None of this moved the Times opinion page — until Bartov asked. And when he did, he told FAIR in an email: “I was approached by Dan Wakin of the New York Times in May to write an op-ed.” He did not propose it. He was invited. Others who had been trying to submit similar pieces for years were not FAIR.
Eric Reinhart, an anthropologist and clinician who had attempted for months to publish on this question at the Times, told FAIR there was “a rather systematic exclusion” of non-Israeli voices on the genocide question — and that the Times appeared to prefer that Israelis be the ones to make the case. “It’s an absolutely obscene way to approach this,” he said. His assessment of the stakes: “What they do shapes standards, which influences policies and influences politicians” FAIR.
The Grammar of Erasure: Passive Voice and the “Clash” Trope
The problem is not limited to which words are permitted. It extends into the structure of sentences themselves.
In a 2021 study of New York Times coverage of the first and second intifadas, researcher Holly M. Jackson found that the Times used the passive voice to describe events involving Palestinians twice as often as it did events involving Israelis — demonstrating, in her analysis, “clear patterns of bias against Palestinians” FAIR. The passive voice, as FAIR notes, is what journalist William Schneider called the “past exonerative” tense — a grammatical construction that describes events while erasing the actor responsible.
The pattern persists into recent headlines:
- “At Least Five Palestinians Killed in Clashes After Israeli Raid in West Bank” (New York Times, June 2023)
- “Two Palestinians Killed in Separate Episodes in Latest West Bank Violence” (AP, August 2023)
- “Israeli Forces Say Three Palestinians Killed in Occupied West Bank” (CNN, August 2023)
In each case, the agent of killing either disappears entirely or is grammatically subordinated. “Palestinians killed” — by whom? “Violence” — committed by whom? The now-amended New York Times headline “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup” presented an Israeli missile as if it had autonomous agency, “finding” its targets of its own volition FAIR.
Companion to the passive voice is the word “clash” — what FAIR’s Adam Johnson describes as “a reporter’s best friend when they want to describe violence without offending anyone in power.” In 2018, when Israeli troops fired at unarmed protesters 100 meters away, killing 30 Palestinians while no Israelis died, establishment media described the event as a “clash” FAIR. When Israeli forces beat mourners at Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral — charging at them with horses and batons, deploying stun grenades and tear gas, nearly causing pallbearers to drop the casket — that was also described as a “clash” FAIR.
The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association’s media resource guide is explicit: the occupation “is not a conflict between states, but rather between Israel, which has one of the most advanced militaries in the world, and the Palestinians, who have no formal army.” When that asymmetry goes unacknowledged, “clash” will continue not to sound out of place — and readers will continue to lack the context necessary to identify who is killing whom FAIR.
Whose Deaths Count: The Arithmetic of Coverage
The language bias compounds a deeper structural one: not all deaths receive equal coverage, and the imbalance runs overwhelmingly in one direction.
During Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008–2009, according to Amnesty International and B’Tselem, the assault killed 13 Israelis (four of them by Israeli fire) and nearly 1,400 Palestinians, 300 of whom were children. A 2010 study of New York Times coverage by Jonas Caballero found that the Times covered 431% of Israeli deaths — meaning each Israeli fatality was reported an average of four times — while reporting just 17% of Palestinian deaths. Israeli deaths were covered at 25 times the rate of Palestinian ones FAIR.
At NPR, a FAIR examination of six months of Israel-Palestine broadcasting during the Second Intifada found that 81% of Israeli fatalities were reported, against 34% of Palestinian ones. Among children, the gap was starker: 89% of Israeli minors killed were reported on; only 20% of Palestinian minors FAIR.
The disparity also operates through language. An Intercept analysis of Gaza crisis coverage in the Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal found that highly emotive terms — “slaughter,” “massacre,” “horrific” — were reserved almost exclusively for Israeli victims. “Horrific” was used nine times as often to describe the killing of Israelis as Palestinians. “Slaughter” described Israeli deaths 60 times more than Palestinian ones. “Massacre” appeared more than 60 times more often in reference to Israelis FAIR. A FAIR study found that when the Times used the word “brutal,” 73% of the time it was applied to Palestinians FAIR.
Sidelining Palestinian Voices
Who speaks matters as much as what is said.
Between 1970 and 2019, the New York Times and Washington Post ran 5,739 opinion pieces about Palestinians. Just 1.4% were written by Palestinians FAIR. A 2018 study by 416Labs, analyzing nearly 100,000 news headlines published by five leading US outlets between 1967 and 2017, found that major newspapers were four times more likely to run headlines from an Israeli government perspective, and 2.5 times more likely to cite Israeli sources over Palestinian ones FAIR.
The study’s author, Owais Zaheer, told the Intercept that his findings call attention to “the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue” FAIR.
This exclusion extended even to coverage of murdered Palestinian journalists. A FAIR report released in August 2025 evaluated coverage of Israel’s targeted killing on August 10 of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and five other journalists across 15 major outlets — the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, BBC, Politico, Newsweek, AP, and Reuters Middle East Eye.
FAIR found that all 15 outlets repeated Israeli allegations that al-Sharif was a Hamas member masquerading as a journalist — allegations found to be baseless by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Foreign Press Association, and the United Nations. Only nine of the 15 published al-Sharif’s own antemortem statement: “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.” The New York Times, ABC, BBC, NBC, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal did not include any reference to it. Four of them — the Times, BBC, NBC, and Fox — chose instead to center quotes from Israeli government authorities: the perpetrators behind the killing Middle East Eye.
None of the 15 outlets mentioned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been indicted by the International Criminal Court, or that an arrest warrant existed for him for intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population Middle East Eye.
The BBC’s Secret Report and the “People Like Us” Problem
In the United Kingdom, a parallel dynamic has shaped the BBC for decades — and a suppressed institutional report helps explain why it persists.
In 2003, under pressure from pro-Israel lobby groups, the BBC commissioned senior news executive Malcolm Balen to analyze its coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict for evidence of anti-Israel bias. The resulting 21,000-word report was never published. The BBC spent more than $450,000 in legal fees fighting Freedom of Information requests to release it. The Court of Appeal ruled in 2010 that it should remain secret. The Supreme Court rejected a further appeal in 2012 Electronic Intifada.
Former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn has now read the document. His account, published by the Electronic Intifada, reveals that Balen “found no evidence of deliberate or systematic bias” against Israel. In Balen’s own summary words: “I am conscious that this report has been compiled under a weight of criticism from pro-Israelis and is, in some ways, shaped by it: not because their criticisms are necessarily any more accurate than those from pro-Palestinians, but because they are responsible for the climate of perception which surrounds the BBC’s coverage” Electronic Intifada.
The BBC kept the report secret not because it vindicated Israel’s lobby — it didn’t — but because publishing it would have handed that lobby more ammunition regardless of what it said.
The Balen report did find that the BBC’s flagship Ten O’Clock News was “remarkably unanalytical” and that BBC TV news “should reflect more deeply on recent cause and effect.” The BBC Board of Governors’ own subsequent 2006 report on impartiality found that the corporation’s coverage “failed to take into account the considerable imbalance between the stateless Palestinians and the western-backed state of Israel, and failing to provide proper background and context.” Except for the appointment of a Middle East Editor, Llewellyn reports, the BBC largely ignored its own governors’ findings Electronic Intifada.
Llewellyn identifies the deeper mechanism: a cast of mind he describes as “People Like Us.” Western newsroom culture, he argues, makes it easy to humanize and personalize Israelis, to present Israel as a “civilized” state under attack, while Palestinians are shown as “at best a troublesome mass manipulated by ‘terrorists.’” This framing, he writes, “has made it easier for the BBC during the past 20 years to continue to try to frame defensively the story of Israeli military occupation, incessant and increasing theft of Palestinian land and now visual, daily evidence of wilful ethnic cleansing by military force, even genocide” Electronic Intifada.
The FAIR report on journalist killings confirmed this dynamic at work in the BBC’s coverage: using the qualifier “Hamas-run health ministry” instead of the Gaza Health Ministry; centering the Israeli government’s account of al-Sharif’s killing while omitting his own final statement Middle East Eye.
The Pattern and Its Consequences
What the documentation accumulated by FAIR, the Intercept, 416Labs, the Electronic Intifada, and researchers including Holly M. Jackson reveals is not a series of individual editorial failures. It is a system.
Passive voice erases the agent of Palestinian deaths. The word “clash” eliminates the difference between an army and a crowd. “Retaliation” — applied by FAIR’s survey to Israeli violence 79% of the time on ABC, CBS, and NBC — frames every cycle of killing as one initiated by Palestinians FAIR. Settlements become “neighborhoods.” Refugee camps become “areas.” “Palestine” itself is removed from the map — not by military force in this case, but by editorial memo.
The suppression of the genocide framing until mass starvation and near-total destruction were already accomplished facts is, as Eric Reinhart told FAIR, a question of political consequence, not just journalistic style. “What they do shapes standards, which influences policies and influences politicians” FAIR.
What Amnesty International has characterized as apartheid, what the ICJ has ruled may plausibly constitute genocide, what UN experts described as ethnic cleansing in the making — these determinations existed in the public record throughout. The choice to suppress, qualify, or delay their entry into mainstream coverage was not neutral. It was consequential. And it was a choice.
Sources:
- FAIR — “ACTION ALERT: NYT’s War on Words: Avoid ‘Palestine,’ ‘Genocide,’ ‘Ethnic Cleansing’”
- FAIR — “Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage”
- FAIR — “NYT Suppressed Genocide Discussion When It Could Have Made a Difference”
- Electronic Intifada — “Revealed: Secret BBC report ‘found no evidence’ of anti-Israel bias”
- Middle East Eye — “Western media manufactured consent for Israel’s killing of Gaza journalists, watchdog finds”
Palestinian writer and researcher documenting life under occupation, drawing on primary sources from B’Tselem, Al-Haq, OCHA oPt, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and named scholars.