Israel’s global news coverage vastly disproportionate and unusually persistent, analysis finds

Israel has received vastly disproportionate and unusually persistent media coverage compared with larger countries, states accused of widespread human rights abuses, and countries experiencing deadlier conflicts, according to an independent analysis of global media coverage published last month.

The analysis found that, in contrast to typical media trends, where the coverage volume of stories spikes and then rapidly decays over time, coverage of Israel remained persistently elevated, with no comparable decay. Further, it found that the floor of media coverage of Israel, in years when the country experiences no major conflict or war, is analogous to the level other small countries reach only “in the single worst week of [their] history.”

“The size of the spotlight, its persistence, and its tone are facts. They can be measured,” independent researcher and technology entrepreneur Jeremy Musighi, the author of the analysis, wrote.

Musighi analyzed nearly 14.7 million news articles published between 2017 and August 2026 using the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), a massive open database that monitors global news coverage across 65 languages. He also used GDELT’s television database to measure broadcast coverage. With these, he examined how often countries around the world were mentioned or appeared as the primary subject of international media coverage over time, excluding each country’s domestic press from the data.

Israel media coverage shows unusual persistence

The analysis explains that at the heart of the anomalous attention paid to Israel, beyond the sheer volume of media coverage, was its persistence.

“Coverage volume is half the phenomenon. The other half is time,” Musighi wrote. “News attention is a decay function. A story erupts, peaks, and dies.”

To measure the persistence of major stories, Musighi examined television coverage of significant events from 2020 onward.

When the Taliban seized Kabul in August 2021, the fall of the city at its peak consumed 27% of the US cable news airtime measured in the analysis. Three months later, coverage of Afghanistan had fallen to just 2% of its peak. A year after the event, “it barely registered.”

Sudan followed a similar pattern after war began there in April 2023, despite subsequent famine declarations and a US determination that the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias had committed genocide. The same pattern held following the exodus of more than 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh in September of that year, which the European Parliament called ethnic cleansing.

Further, according to the analysis, Ethiopia’s Tigray war, in which African Union mediator Olusegun Obasanjo estimated around 600,000 people were killed, never reached even 0.03% of US cable news airtime.

Israel followed a markedly different pattern, averaging 5.65% of the US cable news airtime measured in the analysis for a year after the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, higher than Ukraine received in the year following Russia’s invasion.

A year after the attack, coverage remained 27 times its prewar baseline.

In print, coverage likewise showed no sustained decay, peaking at 3.8% in 2024 and remaining at 3.6% through August 2026.

The analysis also found that the volume of coverage dedicated to Israel was similarly disproportionate.

It used 2019, a relatively quiet year in terms of fatalities in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as a baseline year.

That year, according to the UN’s OCHA, Israeli forces killed 135 Palestinians, while Palestinians killed ten Israelis. OCHA’s tally notes that of the 108 Palestinians killed in Gaza that year, 44 were members of armed groups.

The analysis, using data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, cited a lower figure of 83 conflict deaths and compared the toll to “a month or two of homicides in Chicago.”

According to the Chicago Police Department, 492 criminal homicides took place in the city that year.

Still, in 2019, the analysis found that even without a major conflict for Israel to be engaged in, one of every 112 international news articles was primarily about Israel. Israel also ranked seventh in the world in terms of coverage and first in the world in coverage per capita, as it did in every year studied except 2022.

In these per capita terms, it found on average that, over the last decade, “the world wrote about Israel 71x Brazil, 86x China, [and] 283x India.”

Following the start of the war, in 2024, “One in every 26 of the world's articles mentioned Israel,” while the world published “more than twice as many stories about Israel as about all 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined.”

That year, Israel’s per capita news coverage was more than six times higher than Ukraine’s.

GDELT data shows unusually negative tone toward Israel

The analysis also found that coverage of Israel was unusually negative in tone. Using GDELT’s document-tone scores, which measure the balance of positive and negative language in an article, Musighi found that even in relatively quiet 2019, coverage of Israel averaged -2.3 on a scale of -10 to 10, placing it in a similar range to countries including Iran, Syria and Iraq.

The metric, however, measures the language used in an article, rather than whether the coverage itself is biased against Israel.

In 2024, coverage of Israel by Western outlets averaged -4.4, with 78% of articles scoring negative, placing it in a more negative register than the same outlets applied to Russia, Iran or Syria that year.

Israel’s wartime register, Musighi wrote, was “darker than that of Iran, where dissidents are hanged to death by the regime from cranes in densely-populated city centers.”

In response to the findings of disproportionate persistence and volume in coverage of Israel, Musighi argues that “only one class of explanation survives.”

He traces the pattern back to a decades-old anti-Israel influence campaign, which he says was first spearheaded by the Soviet Union to turn international opinion against Israel and the United States, and was later taken up and sustained by other state actors, international institutions, and activist networks.

“The spotlight is not a response to events,” he wrote. “The spotlight is the operation.”