Investigating the dehumanisation of Palestinians: Western media’s assault via headlines

1 Executive Summary

We analysed over 20,000 headlines from the BBC, the New York Times, and the Guardian and found systematic, quantifiable patterns of biased framing that dehumanise Palestinians and shield Israel from accountability. These outlets do not fabricate facts. They do something more insidious: they deploy a set of interlocking linguistic techniques that determine how readers process those facts, techniques that operate differently depending on whether the perpetrator is a Western-aligned state or an adversary. The result, across three newsrooms, thousands of headlines, and twenty months of coverage, is that Israeli violence against Palestinians is rendered invisible, uncertain, clinical, and emotionally remote, while comparable Russian violence against Ukrainians is reported with directness, certainty, plain language, and human empathy.

These techniques do not operate in isolation. They compound. A single headline about an Israeli airstrike killing children can simultaneously erase Israel as the agent, hedge a verified event as a contested claim, wrap the killing in clinical jargon, and withhold the humanising framing that would make the reader feel the death as a tragedy. The same outlet, covering the same category of event for Russia, will name the perpetrator, state the killing as fact, describe it in plain language, and centre the victim’s story. This is the same newsroom, making opposite framing choices, for the same category of human suffering.

1.1 What the insights reveal

37% of Israel-Palestine headlines erased the perpetrator entirely, nearly twice the rate for Russia-Ukraine coverage (19%)
The BBC obscured Israeli responsibility in 83% of relevant headlines, the NYT in 65%, and the Guardian in 57%
When adjusted for protective vs accusatory function, the protection ratio for Israel over Russia ranged from 5x to 15x
Even when Israel admitted to its own actions, outlets hedged verified events with “reportedly” and “claims,” deploying distancing language at 2.5x the rate of Russia-Ukraine coverage
Israeli actions received 2-4x more doubt-casting than comparable Russian actions across all three outlets
70% of headlines about Israeli actions in the BBC and NYT wrapped bombings in sanitised language like “operations” and “targeted actions,” compared to 2-3% for identical Russian violence
Ukrainian victims were humanised 77-84% of the time, while Palestinian victims received such humanisation only 52-64% of the time
Israel, despite being the perpetrator, received nearly identical empathetic framing to the very people it was killing

1.2 Why this matters

People have long suspected that these outlets were biased against Palestinians, and their suspicions have been routinely dismissed as paranoia or exaggeration. This investigation transforms those intuitions into hard, quantifiable evidence across 20,000+ headlines that cannot be waved away.

When a reader encounters “buildings destroyed” rather than “Israel destroys buildings,” accountability evaporates and outrage dissipates. Multiply that by millions of readers across years of coverage, and you arrive at the manufactured apathy that has enabled a genocide to proceed while the world looked the other way. These numbers identify precisely where and how the framing operates, giving regulators, educators, watchdogs, and ordinary readers the tools to fight back.

1.3 Recommendations

For the BBC, NYT, and the Guardian

Audit headline guidelines for differential application of passive voice, attribution, and euphemistic language across conflicts
Establish parity standards: if Russia’s actions warrant direct language, so do Israel’s
Publish transparency reports on editorial language choices in conflict coverage

For media regulators and press standards bodies

Incorporate linguistic bias metrics into regulatory frameworks
Commission periodic computational audits of conflict coverage
Develop enforceable guidelines addressing the systematic manipulation of reader perception through framing

For civil society and media watchdog organisations

Conduct ongoing, real-time monitoring using this study’s methodological framework
Build public-facing dashboards making bias metrics accessible to general audiences
Advocate for media literacy curricula that teach identification of agent deletion, distancing, and sanitising framing

2 Background

One of the most horrid events to blot the collective consciousness of humanity in recent times is the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Massacres upon massacres were streamed live, and repeatedly shown, only for people to shrug off and move about their lives as if Palestinians did not matter.

One of the vehicles enabling this apathy has been propaganda at mass scale, particularly when masqueraded as objective news reporting by a majority of Western news outlets.

This investigation seeks to expose how some of these news outlets have sought to manufacture mass apathy, focusing explicitly on headlines as they are the first point of contact between a reader and hidden propaganda. Our study confirms that it is these headlines that are riddled with propaganda and anti-Palestinian biases.

The investigation was initiated based on ‘early signals’ received from experts in journalism and Palestinian history, who were already identifying instances of biased headlines leading to the dehumanisation of Palestinians.

In the upcoming sections, we show how the Western media used not just passive tense but a host of other techniques to absolve Israel of any responsibility in the massacre of Palestinians.

3 Methodology

3.1 Analysis

Our analysis tackles two fundamental questions at the heart of bias exposure:

What type of coverage is given to the Palestinian genocide?

Coverage Type	Characteristics
(1) Fighting / War related	Military operations, battles, attacks, weapons use, combat casualties, territorial gains/losses, escalation threats
(2) Human cost and tragedy	Civilian suffering, refugees, displacement, personal loss, health crises, aid needs, trauma, hostages
(3) Ripple effects on nearby regions	Economic sanctions, trade impacts, regional stability, social change, environmental and cultural effects
(4) Diplomacy and politics	Peace talks, diplomacy, leader statements, UN actions, alliances, political decisions, legal accountability

For the coverage in question, are the headlines biased? If so, what linguistic manipulation is used to steer readers towards a particular narrative?

Category	Sub-type	Definition	Example
Agency Obscuration	(1) Agent deletion	Omitting who performed an action, making events appear spontaneous without human agency	“Bombs fell on residential areas” vs “Israeli forces bombed residential areas”
Agency Obscuration	(2) Passive voice	Grammatical structure demoting or omitting the actor responsible for an action	“50 civilians were killed in airstrikes” vs “Israeli airstrikes killed 50 civilians”
Agency Obscuration	(3) Nominalisation	Converting action verbs to abstract nouns (e.g., “destruction” vs “X destroyed”), hiding actors	“Destruction of Gaza neighbourhood continues” vs “Israeli forces continue destroying Gaza neighbourhood”
Doubt Amplification	(4) Distancing language	Using qualifiers, scare quotes, or hedges to create doubt about verified events	“Israeli forces accused of ‘massacre’” vs “Israeli forces conduct massacre”
Emotional Dampening	(5) Sanitising language	Clinical/technical terminology that masks the violent or harmful nature of events	“Military neutralises 15 targets in precision operation” vs “Military kills 15 people in bombing raid”
False Equivalence	(6) False equivalence	Implying equal responsibility between parties with significant power imbalances	“Violence erupts between protesters and police” vs “Police clash with protesters”
Empathetic Narrative	(7) Empathetic narrative framing	Foregrounding individual stories over systemic perspectives to drive emotional engagement	“Refugee father carries sleeping child 15 miles to border” vs “Refugees travel long distances on foot to reach border”

A key part of our methodology is that we compare coverage and biases detected in the Israel-Palestinian conflict against the Russia-Ukrainian war. This comparative design is deliberate and requires justification.

3.2 Why benchmark against Russia-Ukraine?

The comparison is not designed to claim the two conflicts are politically identical. It tests a specific null hypothesis: if the linguistic patterns in Israel-Palestine coverage were the product of editorial convention or generic journalistic norms, we would expect broadly similar patterns in Russia-Ukraine coverage. Both conflicts involve:

Large-scale military operations causing mass civilian casualties
Documented war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law
Asymmetric power dynamics (a dominant aggressor and a weaker party bearing civilian harm)
Extensive humanitarian crises and active legal proceedings (ICJ, UN resolutions)

The same outlets, applying the same editorial standards, produce radically different linguistic outputs depending on the conflict. Israeli responsibility is obscured at 2x the rate of Russian responsibility. Israeli violence is sanitised at 20-35x the rate. Israeli actions receive 2-4x more protective distancing language. Palestinian victims are humanised 15-25 percentage points less than Ukrainian victims.

These are not marginal variations. They are systematic, large-magnitude disparities across all three outlets, all bias categories, and the entire twenty-month observation period. If anything, Palestinians, a stateless and occupied population, should receive more careful attribution and humanisation. The data show the precise opposite.

The Russia-Ukraine benchmark serves as a control condition isolating the variable of geopolitical alignment. It demonstrates that Western outlets are capable of direct, accountability-centred reporting, and that they systematically choose not to apply it when the perpetrator is a Western-aligned state.

3.3 Data

We extracted data from the following major Western news outlets:

The NYT
The BBC
The Guardian

From each, we extracted data from Oct 2023 until May 2025, and filtered for headlines that pertained to either Israel-Palestine or Russia-Ukraine war, eventually ending with 20,000+ headlines.

3.4 Scope: Why headlines

Most readers never get past the headline, and on social media the headline is often all they see. This analysis focuses on headlines categorised under “The Human Cost,” accounting for 36% of Israel-Palestine coverage. Analysis of remaining clusters is forthcoming.

3.5 Sample headlines and analysis

Headline	Coverage Type	Deframe AI Bias/Framing Assessment	Deframed Headline
“Aid to Gaza falls to lowest level in 11 months despite US ultimatum to Israel”	The Human Cost	🚨 Agent deletion	Israel Restricts Aid to Gaza to Lowest Level in 11 Months Despite US Ultimatum
“Israeli Strike Kills Over 20, Including Children, Gaza Officials Say”	The Human Cost	🚨 Distancing language	Israeli Bombing Kills Over 20, Including Children, in Gaza
“Back-to-Back Israeli Strikes Show Tragic Gaps in Choosing Targets”	The Human Cost	🚨 Distancing language 🚨 Sanitising Language	Israel Repeatedly Bombs Civilians, Exposing Failures to Distinguish Combatants from Non-Combatants
“After Strike, Aid Groups in Gaza Are More Fearful Than Ever”	The Human Cost	🚨 Sanitising Language 🚨 Agent deletion	After Israeli Strike, Aid Groups in Gaza Are More Fearful Than Ever
“The Israeli hostage whose body was returned Saturday had spoken of feeling unsafe.”	The Human Cost	✅ Empathetic Narrative	The Israeli hostage whose body was returned Saturday had spoken of feeling unsafe

4 Understanding coverage of the conflicts

Both conflicts undergo a ‘disaster fatigue’ stage - outlets report heavily on a conflict at its outset. However, as time passes, reporting gets lesser in quantity until stabilising or vanishing.
The Guardian prioritized Russia-Ukraine most heavily (1,000+ articles/month initially), while the NYT showed the sharpest Israel-Palestine pivot (340+ articles October 2023). BBC displayed weakest intensity for both conflicts.
Note: Whilst Israel/Palestine was being covered before Oct 2023 with low intensity, the focus of this research is on coverage given from 7th Oct 2023 onwards.

Gaza coverage prioritizes humanitarian suffering — 36% of headlines pertain to documentation of ‘Human cost’ (civilian casualties, displacement, hostages) against 18% for Ukraine.
Procedural diplomacy dominates Israel/Palestine framing. Despite peace breakthroughs, ‘Diplomatic Chess Game’ comprises 34% of coverage (UN resolutions, ceasefire calls, ICJ proceedings) versus 26% for Ukraine, where sanctions and NATO coordination produced tangible alliance shifts.
Ripple Effects expose editorial blind spots — Gaza’s global repercussions register merely 11% against Ukraine’s 28%, showing outlets under-play consequences of Israel’s war on Palestine, treating it as a more ‘localised’ genocide.

5 The Human Cost

We first focus on the Human cost coverage of the Palestinian genocide and compare the same coverage to Russia/Ukraine war.

5.1 Responsibility obscuration: Absolving an agent from responsibility

Agent deletion occurs when headlines omit the responsible actor or use passive voice, presenting violence as though it occurred spontaneously. For example, “buildings destroyed in overnight shelling” rather than “Israeli forces destroy buildings.”

The technique mirrors a pattern well-documented in domestic violence discourse: “woman beaten” structurally performs the same erasure as “neighbourhood levelled.” In both cases, removing the agent from the sentence removes accountability from the reader’s cognitive frame.

When applied selectively — erasing some actors while naming others — it functions not as neutral editorial economy but as a systematic mechanism for distributing responsibility unevenly.

Kakhovka Dam destruction causes massive flooding and displacement
Intensified Israeli bombardment of Khan Younis and southern Gaza
South Africa files genocide case at ICJ; Israel escalates Gaza attacks
Israel’s flour massacre; 112 Palestinians killed waiting for aid in Gaza City
Rafah offensive begins despite international opposition
Israel intensifies attacks in West Bank and continues Gaza operations
Renewed Israeli military killings before ceasefire negotiations
Ceasefire collapses; Israeli killings resume in Gaza

37% of headlines covering Israel-Palestine conflict had agency deletion, vs. 19% covering Russia-Ukraine war
As such, headlines on Israel-Palestine were ~2x more likely to undergo agent deletion

To quantify which actors receive linguistic protection through responsibility obscuration, we calculated the proportion of headlines employing agent deletion when covering each actor’s actions:

\[R_{\text{obscuration}}(A) = \frac{|H_A^{\text{deleted}}|}{|H_A^{\text{deleted}}| + |H_A^{\text{clear}}|} \times 100\%\]

Where \(A\) = actor (Israel, Russia, Palestine, Ukraine), \(H_A^{\text{deleted}}\) = headlines covering actor \(A\) with agent deletion, and \(H_A^{\text{clear}}\) = headlines with clear attribution.

This metric reveals how systematically an outlet obscures responsibility for an actor’s infliction of human suffering, independent of coverage volume.

All three outlets systematically protected Israel from accountability for actions causing casualties in Gaza:

BBC: 83% of Israeli action headlines used agent obscuration (4 in 5 headlines)
NYT: 65% employed responsibility-obscuring language (3 in 5 headlines)
Guardian: 57% obscured Israeli responsibility (3 in 5 headlines)
This trend reverses for Palestine and Ukraine - news outlets directly assign blame to Palestinians, while for Ukrainians their attacks are celebrated
Interestingly, 52% and 47% of headlines from the BBC and the NYT on Russia also hid blame from Russia. More on this below.

Russia presents a paradox: High obscuration has an opposite function:

The psychological impact of using agency obscuration in a conflict wherein the perpetrator is well known is not to deflect blame. Instead, it serves to belittle the agent without any possibility of obscuring its responsibility
In addition, a deeper inspection of these headlines (where Russia’s agency is obscured) reveals that agency deletion centers Ukrainian victimhood and suffering, creating accusatory absence that implies Russian guilt through humanitarian framing
In contrast, for Israel, agency deletion obscures accountability and prevents clear attribution, creating protective absence that shields from responsibility

A sample of the headlines displaying this phenomenon is presented below.

If we exclude such headlines where agency deletion is not to obscure agency but simply to centre Ukrainian suffering, an even starker picture emerges. We quantify this using the Protection Ratio:

\[\rho_{\text{protection}} = \frac{R_{\text{obscuration}}(\text{Israel})}{R_{\text{obscuration}}(\text{Russia})}\]

The Guardian proves this is editorial choice: only 19.7% Russian obscuration vs 80.3% clear attribution. When outlets choose directness, they can achieve it. Israel’s 57-83% obscuration rates are therefore deliberate framing decisions.

BBC: 11x more obscuration for Israel compared to Russia (83.3% vs 52.2%)
NYT: 4.7x more obscuration for Israel (65.4% vs 13.9%)
Guardian: 14.6x more obscuration for Israel (57.3% vs 3.9%)
When adjusted for protective vs accusatory obscuration, Israel receives an estimated 5-15x more protective obscuration than Russia

💡 Key Takeaway

These findings demonstrate that agent deletion rates vary systematically based on geopolitical alignment, with the same linguistic technique serving opposite political functions: protection for allies through responsibility obscuration, vilification for adversaries through victim-centered accusatory absence.

The protection gap is quantifiable, consistent across outlets, and represents editorial choice rather than structural necessity.

5.2 Distancing language: Sowing doubts about verified events

Distancing language is used to create artificial doubt into reporting on verified events/ actions of an agent, to ultimately soften the agent’s role. This is done through attribution markers (“says,” “claims,” “reportedly”), modal hedging (“may have,” “apparently”), scare quotes around factual descriptions, and euphemistic substitutions.

The distinction between “Israel bombs hospital” and “Israel says strikes reportedly hit hospital” is not one of journalistic caution but of a structural transformation of fact into contested claim. The mechanism operates even against the strongest possible evidence: when an agent admits wrongdoing — the highest verification status any claim can achieve — distancing language can still intervene to reframe the admission as uncertain narrative.

Applied selectively, this doubt-casting functions not as a reflection of genuine epistemic uncertainty but as an editorial protection mechanism, determining which agents face direct accountability in print and which are cushioned by layers of hedging.

Intensified bombardment of Khan Younis and southern Gaza
Israel kills 112 Palestinians in the Flour Massacre; Rafah invasion preparations intensify
Ramadan ceasefire talks fail; continued bombardment across Gaza
Rafah offensive begins; Israel seizes Rafah crossing despite ICJ orders
Continued Rafah operations; humanitarian crisis deepens
Israel continues ‘multi-front’ attacks; northern Gaza siege intensifies
Intense bombardment before ceasefire negotiations; Gaza death toll exceeds 45 thousand
Ceasefire and hostage release deal announced after negotiations
Ceasefire collapses/major violations; Israeli attacks resume
Renewed military operations; Israeli tensions with Iran escalate

Approx. 18% of headlines covering Israel-Palestine conflict had distancing language, vs. 7% covering Russia-Ukraine war
This translates to 2.5x more distancing language being used for covering the Palestinian Genocide

To quantify which agents’ documented actions are artificially cast into doubt, we calculated the proportion of headlines using distancing language for each agent:

\[R_{\text{distancing}}(A) = \frac{|H_A^{\text{distanced}}|}{|H_A^{\text{distanced}}| + |H_A^{\text{direct}}|} \times 100\%\]

Where \(A\) = agent (Israel, Russia, Palestine, Ukraine), \(H_A^{\text{distanced}}\) = headlines covering agent \(A\)’s actions through hedging devices that introduce artificial uncertainty, and \(H_A^{\text{direct}}\) = headlines stating the same agent’s actions as established fact.

This metric reveals how systematically an outlet inserts doubt between an agent and their actions — even when those actions are verified, documented, or self-admitted. A higher distancing rate indicates that an outlet converts factual reporting into hedged narrative, shielding the agent from direct accountability. A lower rate indicates unmediated factual attribution.

Across all three outlets, Israeli actions are consistently mediated through distancing language that introduces artificial uncertainty (BBC: 56%; Guardian: 52%; NYT: 30%)
Between one in two and one in three headlines about Israeli actions are linguistically structured to introduce doubt
The same outlets report Russian actions with minimal protective distancing (BBC: 24%; NYT: 16%; Guardian: 15%)
Both Palestine and Ukraine receive virtually no protective distancing across any outlet

The differential application can be quantified as a ratio of distancing rates:

\[\rho_{\text{distancing}} = \frac{R_{\text{distancing}}(\text{Israel})}{R_{\text{distancing}}(\text{Russia})}\]

Guardian: 3.5x more distancing for Israeli actions (52% vs 15%)
BBC: 2.3x more distancing for Israeli actions (56% vs 24%)
NYT: 1.9x more distancing for Israeli actions (30% vs 16%)

Across all three outlets, Israeli actions receive between two and four times more doubt-casting protection than comparable Russian actions.

💡 Key Takeaway

Distancing language reveals itself not as epistemic caution proportionate to genuine uncertainty, but as a selectively deployed editorial mechanism.

When outlets report Russian actions with 85% directness while hedging Israeli actions 52% of the time — including Israel’s own admissions of wrongdoing — the pattern indicates that linguistic distancing operates as a function of geopolitical alignment rather than verification status. The same categories of events that warrant direct factual assertion for one actor receive systematic hedging for another, producing fundamentally asymmetric conditions of accountability across conflicts.

5.3 Sanitising language: Softening the human cost of war and genocide

Sanitising language substitutes clinical, technical, or bureaucratic terminology for direct descriptions of violence — converting killings into “operations,” civilian deaths into “collateral damage,” and systematic targeting failures into “gaps in choosing targets.” The effect is to suppress the moral and emotional register of reporting: events that would provoke immediate outrage when described in plain language become procedural when rendered in sterile jargon.

This creates an asymmetry not in what is reported, but in how it is experienced by the reader — the same act of violence processed through fundamentally different affective frames depending on whose violence it is.

Ukraine advances in southern counteroffensive; Russian defensive operations intensify
Winter offensive preparations; increased missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure
South Africa files genocide case at ICJ; Israel escalates operations in Khan Younis
Israel kills 112 Palestinians in Flour Massacre; Rafah invasion preparations intensify
Rafah offensive begins; Israel seizes Rafah crossing despite ICJ orders
Continued Rafah operations; humanitarian crisis deepens
Ukraine’s surprise Kursk incursion into Russian territory begins
Renewed Israeli aggression on Gaza City and Khan Younis; ceasefire negotiations stall
Russia intensifies attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure ahead of winter
Intense Israeli bombardment before ceasefire negotiations; Gaza death toll exceeds 45 thousand
Ceasefire collapses or major violations; hostilities resume

To quantify how outlets use clinical, technical, or euphemistic language to mask the violent reality of actions, we measured the proportion of headlines employing sanitising language when describing harmful events:

\[R_{\text{sanitizing}}(A) = \frac{|H_A^{\text{sanitized}}|}{|H_A^{\text{sanitized}} + H_A^{\text{direct}}|} \times 100\%\]

Where \(A\) = actor (Israel, Russia, Palestine, Ukraine), \(H_A^{\text{sanitized}}\) = headlines using euphemisms, clinical terminology, or abstract language that obscures violence or harm, and \(H_A^{\text{direct}}\) = headlines using plain language that clearly conveys the violent or harmful nature of actions.

This metric reveals how systematically outlets soften the emotional and moral impact of violence through linguistic distance. Higher sanitizing rates indicate greater use of euphemistic language that creates psychological distance from human suffering.

Across all three outlets, Israeli military actions are consistently described through sanitizing language that obscures violent reality (BBC: 70%; NYT: 70%; Guardian: 40%)
Between four in ten and seven in ten headlines about Israeli actions employ euphemistic terminology (“operation,” “response,” “targeted action”) rather than direct language (“bombing,” “killing,” “attacking”)
The same outlets describe Russian actions with plain, unvarnished language (BBC: 97% direct; NYT: 98% direct; Guardian: 98% direct)

💡 Key Takeaway

Sanitizing language reveals itself not as technical precision appropriate to military reporting, but as a selectively deployed euphemistic mechanism that manufactures psychological distance from violence.

When outlets describe Russian airstrikes with direct language like “bombs,” “kills,” and “attacks” while framing Israeli airstrikes through clinical abstractions like “operations,” “responses,” and “targeted actions” 70% of the time, the pattern indicates that euphemistic framing operates as a function of geopolitical alignment rather than event characteristics.

The same categories of violence (e.g., airstrikes causing mass civilian casualties) that receive unvarnished language for one agent are systematically sanitized for another, producing fundamentally asymmetric emotional and moral responses to identical acts of warfare.

5.4 Empathetic narratives: Building human connections with the oppressed

Empathetic narrative framing is not a bias but a humanising technique: headlines that foreground individual stories activate reader empathy in ways that aggregate statistics cannot. This is legitimate and often essential journalism.

The analytical concern is not the technique itself but its distribution. When certain populations are consistently individualised and humanised while others are reduced to anonymous casualty figures, the selective application of empathy becomes a form of editorial hierarchy, determining whose suffering registers as fully human.

South Africa files genocide case at ICJ; Israel escalates attacks in Khan Younis
Rafah offensive begins; Israel seizes Rafah crossing despite ICJ orders
Renewed Israeli attacks on Gaza City and Khan Younis; ceasefire negotiations stall
One-year anniversary of Israeli genocide; Israel escalates attacks on Lebanon
Intense Israeli bombardment before ceasefire negotiations; Gaza death toll exceeds 45 thousand
Ceasefire complications; tensions over implementation and hostage releases
Ceasefire collapses/major violations; Israeli hostilities resume

To quantify which victims receive empathetic, humanizing coverage that centers their suffering and experiences, we measured the proportion of headlines employing empathetic narrative framing:

\[R_{\text{empathetic}}(V) = \frac{|H_V^{\text{empathetic}}|}{|H_V^{\text{empathetic}} + H_V^{\text{clinical}}|} \times 100\%\]

Where \(V\) = victim group (Palestine, Ukraine, Israel, Russia), \(H_V^{\text{empathetic}}\) = headlines using humanizing language that centers victim suffering, personal stories, emotional impact, or lived experiences, and \(H_V^{\text{clinical}}\) = headlines not using any empathetic framing (e.g., abstract, statistical, or emotionally distant language).

This metric reveals which victims are portrayed as fully human subjects worthy of empathy versus which are reduced to statistics or abstract casualties. Higher empathetic framing rates indicate systematic humanization through victim-centered storytelling.

Russian anti-state voices receive universal humanization (100% empathetic framing across all outlets), followed closely by Ukrainian victims (BBC: 77%; Guardian: 84%; NYT: 77%)
Palestinian victims receive systematically lower empathetic framing (BBC: 60%; Guardian: 64%; NYT: 52%), representing 1.3-1.5x less humanization than Ukrainian victims despite comparable civilian casualties
Israel receives nearly identical humanization to Palestine (BBC: 68%; Guardian: 55%; NYT: 58%) despite its role as perpetrator inflicting casualties at a 20:1 ratio and facing credible accusations of genocide
This creates a fundamental asymmetry: the militarily dominant actor causing mass civilian death receives equal or greater empathetic framing than its victims

The BBC uses empathetic narrative framing to build solidarity primarily with Ukraine and Israel
For Palestine, the BBC focuses on documenting suffering of Palestinians, but at the expense of building any solidarity or humanising them
In contrast, with Russia, the dynamics are varied as the BBC highlights heroism of Russian opposition (to Putin), humanises these opposition figures, and documents suffering due to Putin’s actions

The NYT headlines build solidarity with Ukraine and Israel in almost equal measure
In addition, NYT also uses headlines to document suffering for Israelis more than Ukrainians
For Palestine, focus remains more on suffering documentation but overall least focus on building solidarity with the victims (compared to Israel, Ukraine, and Russia)

The Guardian’s headlines build solidarity with Ukraine and Israel, with more focus given to Israel in documenting suffering of Israelis
Russian coverage focuses on highlighting heroism of opposition figures, whilst also documenting suffering of Russians due to Putin’s push for war
Palestine coverage emphasises documentation of suffering due to Israeli genocide. However, focus on building solidarity remains dreadfully low compared to Israel and Ukraine

💡 Key Takeaway

Empathetic narrative framing reveals itself not as a neutral journalistic practice of humanizing all suffering equally, but as a selectively deployed mechanism that privileges Western-aligned victims while maintaining emotional distance from adversary populations.

When outlets humanise Ukrainian suffering through personal stories, emotional impact, and lived experiences 79% of the time while providing the same treatment to Palestinian suffering only 59% of the time — despite the latter enduring more civilian casualties, displacement, and infrastructure destruction — the pattern indicates that victim humanization operates as a function of geopolitical alignment rather than humanitarian need.

The near-parity between Israeli empathetic framing (60%) and Palestinian framing (59%), despite radically asymmetric power dynamics and casualty ratios, further demonstrates that empathy is distributed based on political proximity to Western interests rather than proportionate to actual suffering. Coverage systematically elevates some victims to full human subjects worthy of emotional engagement while reducing others to more abstract casualties, shaping public empathy and moral concern through narrative choices alone.

6 Conclusion: The architecture of manufactured apathy

This is not a story of isolated editorial lapses. It is an architecture of interlocking linguistic mechanisms that, with each headline, construct a world in which Palestinian death simply does not register the way other death does. The same three newsrooms, covering the same category of event, the killing of civilians, produce opposite linguistic outputs depending on who is doing the killing and who is dying.

The four mechanisms compound one another:

Agent deletion erases the killer from the headline, preventing accountability from ever forming in the reader’s mind
Distancing language converts verified massacres into contested claims, suppressing the moral certainty that would demand action
Sanitising language wraps bombings in clinical jargon like “operations” and “responses,” dampening the outrage that plain language would provoke
Selective empathy determines whose children are mourned and whose are counted, shaping which victims the reader is moved to care about

The result is not mere bias. It is the manufacture of apathy at industrial scale, shaping public opinion, constraining political will, and ultimately determining whether populations mobilise to stop a genocide or shrug and scroll past it.

6.1 Future directions

Three additional coverage clusters remain for analysis: fighting and military operations, diplomacy and politics, and ripple effects, each presenting distinct mechanisms such as false equivalence in fighting coverage and nominalisation in diplomatic coverage
We are developing specialised, fine-tuned language models for headline bias detection, contributing open-source tooling that researchers, journalists, and civil society can deploy independently
These numbers are a baseline. What matters next is whether they change, and sustained monitoring, enabled by the tools we are building, will ensure the world is watching

7 About Deframe

This research was conducted by Deframe, an initiative dedicated to exposing systematic linguistic bias in news media through computational analysis and public education.

Our Mission

Deframe arms citizens with the tools to resist manufactured consent by revealing how news headlines systematically frame narratives to shape public perception. We believe that cognitive sovereignty is essential to democratic discourse. Rather than debating whether sources are “biased” or “trustworthy,” we focus on exposing the linguistic techniques themselves, such as agent deletion and sanitizing language, enabling readers to see how framing operates regardless of source.

The Reveal Tool

Our public-facing tool at deframe.ai allows anyone to analyze individual headlines for linguistic bias. Simply paste any headline into our Reveal interface to:

Identify which bias techniques are present
Understand how each technique shapes perception
See a “deframed” version that makes agency and responsibility explicit

Get Involved

Use the Reveal tool: deframe.ai
Access our research: research.deframe.ai
Join the movement: Follow our ongoing analysis of media framing patterns

Contact & Feedback

We welcome critical engagement with our findings and methodology. For questions about methodology, access to raw data, or collaboration inquiries:

Website: deframe.ai
Research Portal: research.deframe.ai
Email: ali@deframe.ai