The Blind Spot of The Western Media: The Invisibility of Genocide in Reporting on the Israel–Palestine Conflict

OpenAlex Türkçe

The purpose of this study is to reveal how the genocidal massacres committed by Israel during the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that began on October 7, 2023, were rendered invisible by the Western media. The sample for this case study consists of 75 news articles selected from The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and El País, representing the Western media. The data compiled from these articles were coded into three categories—perpetrator positioning, victim representation, and international legal terminology—and subjected to content analysis. The analysis revealed that in most of the news articles, Israeli military actions were legitimized through passive language, security discourse, and state-sourced references; the Palestinian civilians were mostly represented in narratives of human loss that were disconnected from the perpetrator, out of context, and numerical; and concepts belonging to international law, such as genocide, occupation, collective punishment, and ethnic cleansing, were not used at all in a significant portion of the news articles examined. These findings reveal that the news discourse on Gaza in Western mainstream media is structured around a security-centered framework that excludes discussions of legal responsibility.