The language of political violence and impunity: News framing of Israel and Palestine

Within the field of political communication, it is widely recognized that text reflects complex, enduring interests that point to deep-rooted aspects of ideology and political influence. A conduit of such influence is the news media, which constructs narratives and makes deliberate rhetorical choices in an effort to reinforce existing power structures, framing events to legitimize and advance specific aims, worldviews, and doctrines. When examining news media bias, specific indicators (e.g., word choice and labeling) and sources (e.g., interest groups and corporations) become evident. Historically, research has shown that media representation tends to privilege Israeli perspectives, while coverage of Palestinian suffering and experience remains comparatively limited and less sympathetic. While the existing literature on the pervasiveness of this imbalance in U.S. news outlets is exhaustive, there is less research on comparisons made between Western media and those based in the Middle East. To pursue a data-driven understanding of media bias, we leverage natural language processing (NLP). Our NLP approach relies on quantitative analyses of article headlines from four news sources: Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Notably, Al Jazeera’s headlines were, on average, more negative in sentiment, employed the passive voice least frequently, and featured more critical language of political state actors and their actions. Our findings contribute to discussions on media accountability in conflict reporting. The current study draws attention to the challenges facing international human rights and the role of news media in producing impunity.