Study Exposes Double Standard for CNN and MSNBC Coverage of Gaza v. Ukraine

As the death toll from the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip continued to climb on Monday, The Nation published a study revealing the "glaring double standard" for American corporate media coverage of that war and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The analysis was conducted by Adam Johnson, who co-hosts the podcast Citations Needed and writes media criticism at The Column, and Othman Ali, a researcher and data analyst with an advanced degree from the University of Oxford.

The pair—who released their full dataset on GitHub—focused on the first 100 days of each conflict. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022 and Israel launched its war on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.

Since the Russian invasion, media critics have highlighted "the racist and dehumanizing double standards of war reporting." Over the past year, such criticism has mounted, with arguments that Western media are "enabling" genocide in Gaza.

In March, protesters frustrated with the U.S. "newspaper of record" even gathered in Manhattan and chanted, "New York Times you can't hide, we charge you with genocide." Watchdogs like Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting and Media Matters for America have published various critiques, with the latter often focusing on right-wing sources.

"CNN and MSNBC's pointed lack of sympathy with Palestinians is also important to examine because the media's consistent dehumanization and erasure of their suffering has helped 12 months of a killing campaign."

Johnson and Ali focused on commentary, editorial priorities, and reporting by CNN and MSNBC, explaining that "the third major cable network, Fox News, was not included in our analysis because the focus of our study is in the formation of liberal and Democratic Party-aligned support for Israel's war on Gaza."

They found that on the two networks, Palestinians in Gaza received "far less sympathetic and humanizing coverage than either Israelis during the same period or Ukrainians during the first 100 days after Russia's invasion."

"The point of this analysis is not that U.S. media should reduce its coverage of the tragedies in Ukraine to achieve parity with Gaza, but that it should elevate its coverage of the suffering in Gaza to be comparable to that of Ukraine, with the same urgent and moralizing tone," the pair stressed.

"CNN and MSNBC's pointed lack of sympathy with Palestinians is also important to examine because the media's consistent dehumanization and erasure of their suffering has helped 12 months of a killing campaign, backed by unending American military and political support, that is unprecedented in the 21st century," they added.

Johnson and Ali highlighted four key findings:

• Sympathetic victims like journalists, refugees, and children are mentioned more in Ukraine than in Gaza, despite a significantly wider gap in casualties and human suffering;
• On CNN and MSNBC, emotive words such as "brutal," "massacre," "slaughter," "barbaric," and "savage" were overwhelmingly used to describe the killing of Israelis and Ukrainians, and almost never used to describe the killing of Palestinians;
• CNN and MSNBC covered the impact of Russia's invasion on civilians twice as often as they did the impact of Israel's bombing and siege of Gaza on civilians, despite the latter having a death toll five times that of the former; and
• On CNN and MSNBC, the words "war crime" or "genocide" were mentioned over 17 times more in the context of Ukraine than they were in the context of Gaza.

They found that for each child death in Ukraine during the first 100 days, there was the equivalent of 16.1 mentions on air, while kids in Gaza received the equivalent of 0.36 mentions. For journalist deaths, it was 24 versus 2.5. The study also shows that the networks "covered Ukrainian civilian suffering almost twice as often as they covered that in Gaza," despite the latter having a death toll that was 500% greater.

In just the first 30 days of the Russian invasion, cable news anchors, guests, and reporters used emotive terms for Russians killing Ukrainians 661 times. In the first month of Israel's assault on Gaza, they used such language to describe the killing of Israelis 1,053 times and Palestinians 43 times. Additionally, people appearing on-air for both networks described Ukrainians as being subjected to genocide or war crimes 1,790 times compared to just 104 times for Palestinian victims.

"One common rejoinder to this double standard is that Israel doesn't intentionally kill civilians, whereas Hamas and Russia do," Johnson and Ali pointed out. "But this assertion is based entirely on unsubstantiated conventional wisdom and is belied by scores of data points."

In a note attached to the article, the researchers detailed that the United Nations "estimated that around 4,000 civilians had been killed 100 days into the Ukraine war. The broadly accepted death toll in Gaza for the first 100 days is over 24,000, but this is a figure that doesn't distinguish between civilians and noncivilians. So, in the interest of being conservative, we are using the civilian death toll of 20,000—though this number, as several researchers have explained, is almost certainly a massive undercount because it only includes confirmed deaths, not those unidentified, under rubble, or dying from secondary causes such as preventable illness, starvation, etc."

More than 1,100 people were killed in Hamas' attack on Israel last October, and militants took over 240 others hostages. Some captives have been released, some have been killed—including by the Israeli assault—and some are still believed to be alive.

As of Tuesday, Gaza officials put the confirmed death toll for Palestinians in the Hamas-governed enclave at 42,344, with another 99,013 wounded. In recent days, Israel has bombed a hospital complex and refugee camps. The vast majority of the strip's 2.3 million residents have been displaced, often several times over the past year.

The U.S. government has long supplied Israel with weapons and diplomatic backing and has ramped up such support since last October, despite global criticism. Multiple news outlets revealed Tuesday that in a Sunday letter, the Biden administration finally threatened to cut off U.S. arms unless Israel takes certain action to improve the humanitarian conditions in Gaza.

In response to the letter, Johnson said on social media: "1) Israel can keep bombing all it wants 2) Criteria for 'improve' is vague and like 'invasion of Rafah' they'll just post facto change the definition."

"BUT what's noteworthy is the tacit admission the U.S. can condition military aid," Johnson added, "something I was told was pointless five [minutes] ago."