Palestinian deaths count for less in Canada’s newspapers. Data proves it

Dec. 22, 2023

An analysis of thousands of sentences in Canada’s top newspapers shows a clear bias that serves to sanitize Palestinians’ deaths

The largest Canadian newspapers have given disproportionate attention to the deaths of Israelis, portrayed Israelis in more humanized ways, characterized their deaths as more worthy of indignation, and more often identified who was responsible for killing them, a comprehensive comparison of reporting on the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians reveals. 

The Breach analyzed thousands of sentences in coverage in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and National Post from Oct. 7 to Nov. 24. The study found that dozens of Palestinian deaths were required to merit just one mention in the newspapers, while there was one mention of Israeli deaths for every two Israelis who died.

The study shows a pattern of anti-Palestinian bias in Canada’s establishment media, sanitizing political violence against Palestinians and unequally stirring emotions about Israeli deaths.

Despite the unprecedented scale of Israeli bombing that has killed 20,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children, the newspapers have never used emotionally evocative terms like “massacre” or “slaughter” to describe their deaths. Meanwhile, they regularly used those terms to describe the Hamas attack on Israelis on Oct. 7, when militants killed 1,139 people.

The newspapers were far more likely to assign responsibility for deaths to Hamas militants than to the Israeli military, writing that Palestinians were “hit by strikes” or “under blockade,” or that “thousands of missiles” had been “fired at Gaza,” while Hamas militants usually “killed” specific numbers of people.

Even as the Israeli military’s bombing and invasion of Gaza has turned into a one-sided blood bath, which United Nations experts have described as a “genocide in the making,” the newspapers mentioned Palestinian and Israeli deaths in similar numbers, and in some cases, mentions of Israeli deaths have exceeded Palestinian.

This systematic bias in political framing, assigning responsibility, and sentence construction is a journalistic trickle-down effect of the media mobilizing support for government and corporate interests in Canada which have long backed belligerent Israeli state policies toward the Palestinians.

Worthy and unworthy victims

Over the first seven weeks of the war, the National Post consistently mentioned Israeli deaths more often than Palestinian deaths. 

Their coverage of Israeli deaths even increased in November, as Palestinians were dying in enormous numbers and Israeli deaths had long plateaued. 

The Globe and the Toronto Star mentioned Palestinian deaths more in absolute terms, but their mentions remained out of proportion to the actual and skyrocketing Palestinian death toll.

 

The data speak to just one aspect of the biased coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. 

They illuminate what media theorists Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media suggest are the differences in volume and quality of media attention given to  “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims of violence and war.

Citizens of states like Israel, which is closely allied with the Canadian government, are considered “worthy” and their deaths are treated with more detail, humanization, and outrage in media coverage.

Members of colonized nations like Palestine, whose interests are not supported by the Canadian government, are considered “unworthy” and their deaths are covered in a more low-key way, designed to keep a lid on sympathy and anger. 

Even when Palestinians’ deaths are mentioned in the newspapers, the common use of passive voice creates ambiguity in the minds of readers about who is inflicting violence.

Palestinians often “died,” whereas Israelis often were “killed.”

Another repeated editorial flourish of The Globe and Mail, in the same sentence, was to identify the killers of Israelis while only identifying the geography where Palestinians were killed. “By official count on each side,” the newspaper’s correspondents wrote in a piece published Oct. 16, “more than 1,400 people were killed by Hamas in southern Israel and more than 2,778 have been killed in Gaza in the past 10 days.” [Emphasis added.]

The sheer weight of the repetition of imbalanced descriptions of death is bound to influence and sway readers, alongside the broader political bias in coverage about the roots and context of the Israeli occupation and colonization of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.

The data was compiled by tagging as many articles as possible that mentioned death or words related to death, and then analyzing the relevant sentences. The Breach analyzed 2,088 sentences in the Toronto Star, 2,571 in the National Post, and 1,908 in The Globe and Mail. 

The survey was modeled on an analysis of the coverage of The New York Times conducted by computational scientist Holly Jackson, and illustrated by Pulitizer-prize-winning illustrator Mona Chalabi.

The data about fatalities for the study was taken from the United Nations Humanitarian Affairs Coordination Office (OCHA), which because of communication blackouts likely has conservative estimates.

The Breach has made the code and descriptions of the methodology publicly available. 

The Globe and Mail, National Post, and Toronto Star had not replied to questions from The Breach by time of publication.

When a massacre isn’t a massacre

Besides the bias involved in the greater volume and proportion of attention given to Israeli deaths, there were notable biases in the quality of coverage.

All the Canadian newspapers were strikingly similar in making systematic editorial choices about their language, using highly emotive terms for Israeli deaths that are likely to evoke sympathy and indignation, while not using the same language for Palestinian deaths.

In the sentences analyzed, The Globe and Mail used the term “slaughter” 27 times to describe Israeli deaths, the Toronto Star 28 times, and the National Post 89 times—usually as a factual journalistic description. The newspapers described Palestinian deaths that way zero times. 

The newspapers also used the term “massacre” hundreds of times to describe Israeli deaths, almost always as factual journalistic description—with the National Post using it the most often, 203 times.

Palestinians were never described as being massacred, but each newspaper quoted individuals, usually Hamas spokespeople, referring to a “massacre” on 19 occasions each.

The newspapers have refused to use such terms to describe Israeli bombings in Gaza, despite Palestinians being killed in droves by attacks on schools, residential buildings, refugee camps, mosques, and public markets.

As of mid-December, Israel had dropped 29,000 air-to-ground munitions on Gaza, including hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs, according to a CNN analysis.

One such U.S. bomb leveled a residential apartment block in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing more than 100 civilians.

Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari commented in mid-October that “right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage.”

An investigation by the Israeli publication +972 exposed that the Israeli military has files on the vast majority of its potential targets in Gaza—including residential homes—which lays out the number of civilians likely to be killed in any attack.

The military has been using artificial intelligence to develop large target lists and has been granted expanded authorization to bomb non-military targets, leading to what one former Israeli intelligence officer said was “a mass assassination factory.” 

The New York Times reports that “experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century.”

To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, they quote a former Pentagon senior intelligence advisor saying we may “have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.”

Despite the systematic nature of Israel’s lethal bombing of civilians, The Globe and Mail has reserved phrases like “methodical massacres” only for Hamas’s attacks. 

It often uses more sanitized language for the deaths of Palestinians, writing, for example, of “horrific massacre of civilians conducted by Hamas in Israel on Oct. 7 and the deadly response of the Israeli military in Gaza.” [Emphasis added.]

The National Post used the most extreme—and racially-charged—language like for Hamas.

They described Hamas militants as “barbaric” and “savage” nearly 20 times, but never applied the same language to the Israeli military (they did quote two individuals saying this about Israel).

Whenever respective Israeli or Palestinian deaths were mentioned, the newspapers were far more likely to identify Hamas as responsible instead of Israel.

On Oct. 30,  The Globe and Mail removed a Palestinian commentator’s assignment of blame to Israel. They wrote that Palestinian politician and doctor Mustafa Barghouti’s “main account on X was suspended Monday after a post in which he described how a one-day-old Palestinian child who died in Gaza had been ‘issued a death certificate before receiving a birth certificate.’”

In Barghouti’s post, he had written that newly-born Adi Abu Mohsen had been “killed by Israel.”

Anonymizing Palestinian deaths

At the sentence level, anti-Palestinian bias showed up in the fullness of humanizing details given to Palestinians and Israelis killed.

Israelis who were killed were more often named, their ages more often mentioned, and there were more references to their families, their professions, and place of birth—details that evoke more sympathetic emotion.

By contrast, Palestinians who were killed were often left unnamed, didn’t often have their ages mentioned, and less frequently had their professions or place of birth referenced, as in The Globe and Mail’s description on Oct. 23 of “fifteen members of the same family [who] were among at least 33 Palestinians buried in a mass grave at a Gaza hospital.”

In that article, a murdered Palestinian was simply referred to as the “shrouded corpse of a small child.” 

The Breach counted this as a mention of a Palestinian death in the data despite the framing. 

The National Post was the worst culprit of this imbalance, most commonly leaving Palestinians anonymous.

Systematic anti-Palestinian bias isn’t the only factor in skewing the coverage of Palestinian and Israeli deaths in Canadian newspapers.

The Israeli government has cut off electricity to Gaza and targeted communications infrastructure, impeding better reporting of Palestinian deaths.

The Israeli government also has a far larger communications and press relations apparatus, and Israeli government sources are treated with more authority by the Western media.

“It is the peculiar fate of oppressed people everywhere that when they are killed,” writer and professor Moustafa Bayoumi has written, “they are killed twice: first by bullet or bomb, and next by the language used to describe their deaths.”

Additional research was conducted by Helen Jacob, Saman Dara, and Sahaana Ranganathan.

Support for The Breach’s work has been provided by the Inspirit Foundation. Inspirit does not endorse, influence, edit, or vet journalistic content in advance of or following any publication.