Opinion: How British media favours the Israeli narrative

In a column for Middle East Eye, Faisal Hanif, a media analyst at the Centre for Media Monitoring, argues that British media is favouring Israeli narratives during the ongoing conflict. 

He writes: "In the first month of the war on Gaza, the media used terms such as “slaughter”, “massacres” and “atrocities” to describe the killing of Israelis around 11 times more often than they did to describe the killing of Palestinians.

This is among the findings of a new report analysing coverage of the war on Gaza from the Centre for Media Monitoring, which looks at representations of Muslims in British media. The report comes as the death toll in Gaza soars past 30,000.

Journalists at the BBC last year wrote a letter highlighting what they described as bias in the broadcaster’s coverage of the war - and they certainly have a point. 

Still, some pro-Israel advocates remain dissatisfied, suggesting that certain terms should be exclusive to the 7 October Hamas attacks. In one example cited in the centre’s report, a Conservative politician accused a mainstream British journalist of using “emotive language” when he called the killing of Palestinians in Gaza a “slaughter”.

Indeed, an analysis of British media coverage shows a widespread failure to represent Palestinian voices and concerns, with almost three-quarters of attributions across broadcast television favouring an Israeli source or viewpoint."

You can read the full column below. 

Opinion: How British media favours the Israeli narrative