The Israel Media Problem Is Worse Than You Thought

The Problem of Coverage

Back in May, when I was young and naive, I wrote this:

I knew The New York Times is obsessed with Israel, but I was shocked to learn that in the first nine months of the Israel-Gaza war, the paper of record published 6,656 articles about the conflict. Compare that to the Iraq war, when they published about 80 articles. Or compare that to the 5,434 articles they published about Syria’s civil war over a period of thirteen years.

Similarly, the Associated Press has staffed more reporters and other media personnel in Israel and the Palestinian territories than in China, Russia, and India, or all of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, combined.

Ah! How naive I was! I wish I could go back to my younger days, when I lived in the blissful belief that this was the worst of it. Alas, I have since learned that the problem is so gargantuan it’s hard to grasp. This isn’t the mere tip of the iceberg; it’s just the water floating on top: We haven’t even reached the iceberg of the problem yet.

It was a study by a random guy on X that alerted me to this. Now, why should I trust some dude I never heard of before? Two reasons: One, he confirmed what other studies I examined already showed, except that his was more thorough and covered a much larger amount of ground, orders of magnitude larger. Two, the eminent scholar Adam Louis-Klein follows him, and I trust Louis-Klein, which you will understand if you read the linked bio. (As an aside, I highly recommend his work.)

So this guy, Jeremy Musighi, published a study in which he crunched insanely large numbers. This is how he puts it: “Every news story follows a predictable decay function — it peaks, then is soon forgotten. That is, every story except one: Israel. I analyzed 14.7 million news articles in 65 languages, cable news airtime, and social media data from X. The results were staggering” (my emphasis).

Citing the World Health Organization, Musighi reminds us that the greatest humanitarian catastrophe on earth is taking place right now in Sudan. With 13.6 million people driven out of their homes, 33.7 million in need of aid, and famine formally declared for the first time in more than seven years, the northeast African country nevertheless gets 1/100th of the coverage that Israel gets.

Despite Israel’s tiny size and correspondingly tiny population, this is how much more it’s covered than other countries (the range reflects coverage per year for the past decade):

• 7 to 16 times more than Canada
• 50 to 137 times more than Brazil
• 200 to 600 times more than India

“In 2024, 1 out of every 50 news articles published anywhere on the planet, by outlets outside Israel, was primarily about Israel,” Musighi wrote.

I think “staggering” is an understatement.

Musighi identified another phenomenon. In every case when a major story breaks, it has what he calls a “decay function.” The pattern of a story erupting, peaking, and dying is so reliable and predictable, it can be measured. In every case that he measured, the story followed this pattern, which he measured from the time of the event up to two years following the event.

Sudan’s war, which began on April 2023, for example, peaked at 1.5% of airtime, falling to 1% within eight days. By contrast, after Oct. 7, Israel grabbed 5.65% of airtime, more than Ukraine after the Russian invasion. A year later, it was still holding 27 times more attention than its prewar levels, while coverage of the Ethiopian war remained flat and reached its lowest ebb during its deadliest year.

Instead of Israel’s story peaking and dying, it accelerated and kept accelerating.

Musighi posted an astonishing statistic on X: In 2025, the rebel army known as M23 seized the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In just two months, January to February, the army raped 10,000 people, including 4,500 children — but the global media covered Israel, which was in the midst of a ceasefire at the time, 5.25 times more than the Congo.

To Mughisi, all this is a clear sign of an intentional influence campaign. To me, it’s a sign that the world has gone mad.

I can’t do justice in this small space to the enormousness of Mughisi’s study, but reading it made me realize that the problem is so immense, so out of control, that there’s no point fighting it. Whenever I see Important Jewish Leaders talking about fighting antisemitism, I just feel sorry for them, because it’s so obviously pointless and hopeless. (“Oh, you poor dears,” I think sadly to myself.)

There’s more that Mughisi didn’t cover, because it was outside the scope of his study. For example, HonestReporting released statistics that as settler violence declined, media coverage increased. Although there is about ten times more Palestinian violence toward settlers, the media produced roughly 109 times more articles about settler violence.

You know what? That’s insane.

For another example, back in August I reported for JBN:

The Israeli Foreign Ministry dropped a bombshell revelation Monday: Palestinians in need receive more than 10 times as much United Nations aid per person as people in need in the Congo and Sudan.

A person in Sudan receives $86 in aid. A person in the Congo receives $95 in aid.

An Arab in Gaza, Judea, or Samaria receives a whopping $1,100.

In other words, Palestinians get more than 10 times more per head than these two other desperate groups of people.

The world’s media has gone mad, and it has whipped the international community into a frenzy.

The Problem of International Propaganda Against Israel

Such innocence I had in my youth! The problem is so much worse than I thought.

On Oct. 1, the IDF announced that 170 so-called journalists in Gaza that had been killed during the war, for which the international community excoriated Israel, turned out to be terrorists. The claim is based on “verified evidence, including visual material and documents produced by the terror organizations, some of which were found in the field, indicating the organizational affiliation of those terrorists and the roles they held within the terror organizations” that the IDF has released.

Do you understand what the IDF is saying here? Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist organizations provided the very evidence the IDF used to prove these journalists were affiliated them. How, you ask? By posting martyr photos and videos to their social media accounts, I answer. Salo Aizenberg, Gabriel Epstein, and Joe Truzman have done painstaking investigative work in this area. (I highly recommend following them.)

Hamas et al are not at all concerned about being found out because at this point they have learned that the international media will simply not report anything that will cast Hamas in a bad light and Israel in a good light.

The IDF also discovered that 17 of these “journalists” had participated in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and that some of them had been employed by such international outlets as Reuters, CNN, ABC Australia, BBC, AFP, AP, and Le Monde.

In other words, international news organizations have been publishing reports they received from terrorists.

We now have testimony from an actual journalist from Gaza on how tightly Hamas controls the news. Motaz Azaiza, a much-fêted reporter who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, admitted in a podcast that every journalist in Gaza belongs to a WhatsApp group called SMART, which is run by the Hamas media director of the Rafah Crossing.

Azaiza testified that the journalists in the group act as partisans for Hamas, launching vicious online campaigns against journalists who criticize Hamas, of which Azaiza eventually became a target. After criticizing Hamas, he was forced to flee the Strip and now lives in Qatar.

Azaiza said that he filmed hostages being beaten but did not publish the footage out of fear that the perpetrators would be identified and targeted by the IDF. He felt it was his duty to protect the terrorists. He said that when journalists were filming, any time someone criticized Hamas, they lowered the camera. He did not, and for this he was punished.

While he became a critic of Hamas, the Gazan said he got goosebumps on Oct. 7 and considered joining the attack. He said he supports resistance, and his only objection to the Hamas massacre was that it failed to achieve Hamas’s aims.

FYI, this guy was celebrated by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and appeared on Ms. Rachel’s show.

This is the type of person who is helping to shape the narrative about the Gaza war for the entire world, along with the likes of the 170 journalists who turned out to be terrorists.

The Piers Morgan Claim

He’s not the only one to make this claim, of course. The anti-Israel crowd loves to suppose that Israel is desperately trying to hide something, which is why they deliberately target journalists in Gaza, who, as we have seen, are terrorists in disguise. And that must also be why they don’t allow CNN and the Guardian and the BBC into Gaza.

They can’t imagine a non-nefarious reason for anything Israel does.

They say, as Morgan does, that Israel should allow the journalists to enter at their own peril. Ha! As if. We all know that if Hamas abducts or kills a Western journalist, the rage of the international media will be dialed to fever pitch, and it won’t be directed at Hamas; it will be directed at Israel.

Worse still, imagine if a Western journalist gets killed accidentally in an Israeli airstrike. Nuff said.

The truth is that Israel is hurting its own narrative by not allowing Western journalists into Gaza because, by doing so, they have ceded the narrative to Hamas, as I’ve amply demonstrated. But it’s easy to see why they feel they have no choice if you’re not blinded by hatred.

Where Is All This Leading?

In September, the United Kingdom announced a ban on all goods and services from Judea and Samaria to punish Israel for its plans to build settlements in a section called E1, which is near Maale Adumim in Area C, which is under Israel’s total jurisdiction; as well as to punish Israel for settler violence.

This announcement was followed by a joint statement by Canada, the U.K., and France, which was followed by a joint statement by 10 European countries plus Canada, which was followed by an endorsement of those statements by eight Muslim countries.

Britain’s Foreign Minister Ed Miliband (an “as a Jew” Jew) has taken the lead in pushing for the sanctions, and his rhetoric against Israel is becoming increasingly virulent.

At a Labour Party conference on Sept. 28, the foreign minister said that the suffering that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians is “a stain on the conscience of the world.” He could not find similarly harsh words for the Iranian regime, which may have massacred up to 50,000 of its own people over a two-day period in January.

“We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank,” Miliband proclaimed self-righteously. “We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza. We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine,” he added, conveniently forgetting the U.K.’s controversial — and some say, illegal — occupation of the Chagos Archipelago (which the U.N. ruled was an illegal colonial occupation), the Falkland Islands, and Akrotiri and Dhekelia in Cyprus.

“We will disrupt the supply lines of British finance, British construction, and British services for illegal settlements,” he declared, noting that Britain had “mobilized the international community” to follow suit “country after country.”

“Hamas’s murderous attack on October the seventh united the vast majority of the world in rightful condemnation,” he said. “But this, but this cannot justify the suffering the Netanyahu government has inflicted in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“This suffering, this suffering, is a stain on the conscience of the world, and I want to say to the millions of people in this country, and indeed elsewhere, who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people, we hear you. You were right. And under Andy’s leadership, we have reset our approach,” he explained.

Finally and ominously, he said: “When it comes to the attempt to destroy the two-state solution, this party, this movement, this government says we will not let you succeed” (my emphasis).

This is ominous because it echoes an injunction laid down by the New York Times’s favorite genocide scholar, Omer Bartov. I wrote about this charming fellow, too:

“How do genocides end?” [Bartov] wrote. “In most cases, there are two options. Either the perpetrators accomplish their goal, or a military force stops them, and accountability ensues.”

… In his piece, Bartov laments the possibility that Israel will be allowed to get away with genocide, and what’s more, reap the lucrative profits that genocide brings … [and,] he concludes, Israel MUST BE STOPPED. The implication is that other world powers must step in to militarily defeat Israel, force it to end its genocide, and punish it for its crimes to deter other countries from the temptation to follow suit.

The storm clouds have been massing since Oct. 7, 2023, and, fueled by hysterical media, they are gathering steam — or should I say water vapor? The world is gripped in a mass hysteria about Israel that is not only showing no signs of abating but is increasing with ever greater force. I fear that the day will come when the international community, perhaps led by Great Britain, with Ed Miliband proudly marching at the forefront, will decide that strong rhetoric, arms embargoes, and sanctions are not enough. Israel MUST BE STOPPED. And, perhaps, Israel MUST BE STOPPED AT ALL COSTS.

I pray the world recognizes its madness before it’s too late.