David Williams III
73.5K posts








wow. The Middle East Forum analyzed 1,378 news articles covering the war and found... 98% cited Gaza Ministry of Health figures. Only 5% mentioned Israeli casualty figures for combatants killed. The New York Times cited militant casualty numbers in 0% of its articles analyzed. CNN and the Guardian managed 1%. Only 15% of all articles even noted that Hamas doesn't distinguish combatants from civilians in its data. HonestReporting found that over a four-month period (February-May 2024), 84% of major English-language publications failed to make the combatant-civilian distinction in their total casualty numbers. The effect is that every figure gets absorbed by the audience as a civilian death count. The framing compounds the numbers problem. Journalists routinely cited aggregate totals as purely civilian. CNN's Fareed Zakaria referenced "35,000 civilians dying." CBS's Major Harrison Mann asked, "I don't know how you kill 35,000 civilians by accident." The UN itself produced videos titled "25,000 Civilians Killed" without distinguishing combatants. Meanwhile, asymmetric source scrutiny was the norm. Hamas figures were questioned in roughly 1% of articles. IDF data was challenged in 50% of the limited cases where Israeli sources were cited at all. Nearly 20% of articles cited GHM numbers without even attributing them to Hamas.




























