Bluesky

A survey of a year’s worth of Palestine-Israel coverage by four Sunday morning news shows—NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, CBS’s Face the Nation, and CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash—reveals a startling statistic: With the exception of one interview, the Sunday shows covered and debated the so-called “Israel-Hamas war” for 12 months without speaking to a single Palestinian or Palestinian American.

In addition, the survey shows, these programs display a consistent anti-Palestinian bias. They selectively use emotive words only to describe Israeli victims, ignore Palestinian human shield and rape victims, and routinely platform Israeli officials who have been credibly accused of war crimes—most notably Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

You can find the full data set for this study here.

The Sunday shows are a useful barometer for mainstream US media priorities—not because they garner massive ratings but because, as The Atlantic pointed out in 2018, they “set the agenda” for Washington. As NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen notes, “They crystallize consensus practice in journalism, and display in miniature its relationship to the political class.” As such, we will use the Sunday shows as a representative sample of a broader institutional media bias in support of the Israeli-US military campaign in Gaza—one that Amnesty International recently determined to be genocidal.

In the 208 episodes of Sunday morning news programming from October 8 to October 6—52 episodes each of NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, and CNN’s State of the Union––there have been 2,557 mentions of Gaza. There was only one Palestinian or Palestinian American guest across any of the shows during this period: Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom, who appeared in a seven-minute Face the Nation interview on November 5, 2023. By contrast, the shows featured Israeli guests 20 times—either government officials or families of Israeli hostages. Netanyahu alone made five appearances—once on each of the three network shows, and twice on CNN’s State of the Union. (White House officials appeared 59 times––most frequently national security adviser Jake Sullivan, White House national security communications adviser John Kirby, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.)

None of the shows featured any Palestinian academics, activists, or spokespeople for human rights groups. And, although politicians and government officials typically dominate the guest lists for these programs, Palestinian American Representative Rashida Tlaib was never featured. In fact, she has not appeared on any of the shows since 2019. (State of the Union’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did take time out in September to smear Tlaib by asking Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer if Tlaib’s saying that there were possible anti-Palestinian biases in the Michigan attorney general’s office constituted antisemitism.)

Netanyahu, a leading participant in the conflict, is clearly a relevant person to interview—just not in the way that the Sunday shows did. The anchors on ABC, CBS, and NBC would include one or two semi-difficult questions, usually about starvation and/or credible accusations of war crimes. But they mostly allowed Netanyahu to run through his talking points and outright lies without meaningful pushback.

CNN’s Bash, who interviewed Netanyahu both times he appeared on State of the Union, didn’t even pretend to hold him accountable. In her first interview, from November 2023, she began by accepting the premise that Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City was sitting atop a “Hamas command and control center” (a claim later debunked by The Washington Post), and vaguely expressed concern for “patients in the hospital.” She did not ask Netanyahu to present any evidence of the claim. Nor did she drill down on the issue of Israeli war crimes. Instead, she parroted the US State Department’s mild chiding about whether or not “too many civilians have died,” with the implication that there is some undefined level of acceptable Palestinian civilian deaths.

In her second interview with Netanyahu, from March 2024, Bash avoided issues of civilian deaths altogether. She also again avoided any questions about credible accusations of war crimes and deliberate starvation, instead playing safely within the confines of domestic Israeli politics and whether Netanahyu should “call for new elections.” Double Standards

The discrepancy between the kind of language used on the Sunday shows to describe violence leveled against Israelis versus violence leveled against Palestinians was also on stark display—consistent with the asymmetry of emotive words in print and cable news media that we laid out in our previous analyses.

Palestinian deaths far outpace those of Israelis—by some counts 150 to 1. While Palestinian militants killed more than 800 Israeli civilians on October 7, roughly 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed since (the number is likely much higher). Tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been maimed—at one point 10 children a day had to have one or both legs amputated. Nineteen thousand children have been orphaned. A recent study by the War Child Alliance charity found that 96 percent of children in Gaza feel that their death is imminent and almost half want to die as a result of the trauma they have been through. The study also found that 92 percent of the children in Gaza were “not accepting of reality,” 79 percent suffer from nightmares, and 73 percent exhibit symptoms of aggression.

The average media consumer would be totally ignorant of this lopsided civilian suffering watching the Sunday shows—indeed, they would have the opposite impression. The word “massacre” was used to describe violence against Israelis 33 times and only twice for Palestinians. The word “slaughter” was used 33 times to describe violence against Israelis and only three times for Palestinians. The word “brutal” was used 79 times for Israelis and four for Palestinians.

Despite credible reports of mass rape of Palestinian captives and numerous documented cases of the Israeli military using Palestinians as human shields, reports of Israel doing so were not mentioned once on any of the Sunday shows. Claims of mass rapes targeting Israelis, however, were mentioned 15 different times, and the term “human shields” was used to describe alleged actions by Palestinians 37 different times.

The shows used the doubt-sowing pejorative qualifier “Hamas-run” 31 times when citing Palestinian civilian deaths (as in, “according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health”), while citing Israeli death counts as matters of fact with no sourcing. The term “right to defend itself” was used 149 times, all in reference to Israel. Palestine or Palestinians were never said by any anchors, reporters, or guests to possess any such right. “Israeli hostages” were mentioned 835 times, while “Palestinian prisoners” were mentioned 52 times, and every time it was only in the context of a prisoner exchange pursuant to a release of the Israeli hostages. There was no reporting on, interviewing families of, or acknowledging the thousands of Palestinian hostages inside Israeli detention facilities, languishing for years without trial.

Antisemitism was mentioned 65 times on the Sunday shows during our survey period, while “Islamophobia” or anti-Muslim/anti-Palestinian racism was only mentioned four times.

The overall tone of the coverage was uncritical of US involvement in the “Hamas-Israel war,” remaining safely within the limited confines of “Is the US doing enough to protect civilians?” hand-wringing. Consistent with the previous installment in our series, virtually all the discussion of Gaza framed the US as a humanitarian force working for a ceasefire and trying to mitigate civilian harm, rather than what the US objectively is: an active participant in one side of the conflict. The shows repeatedly let Biden officials come on, seemingly whenever they wished. Sullivan appeared 21 times, Kirby 16 times, and Blinken 10 times. All painted the administration as a third party working to broker peace and provide humanitarian aid—a portrait that was almost wholly unchallenged. To the extent that rare tough questions were asked, they implied mild criticism over the US’s unwillingness to rein in Israel.

To the extent that there was critical reporting or interviewing, it was over excesses and execution. There was no mention in any of the shows of the thousands of Palestinian hostages being held by Israel, no mention of apartheid, no mention of the widespread sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, no discussion of the siege, repeated bombings, and a policy of starvation waged against Gaza pre–October 7. There was simply a “brutal” “massacre” and “slaughter” of Israelis, then a war of “defense,” followed by some unfortunate but unavoidable “excess civilian deaths,” which were Hamas’s fault in any event. Anything that could have complicated this narrative—particularly an interview with a Palestinian—was avoided. Instead, those turning to the Sunday shows to understand events or shape political priorities for the coming week were fed a consistent diet of superficial moralizing, softball interviews with US and Israeli officials, and entirely one-sided empathy and humanization.