Laying Bare the Media’s Manufactured Campaign Against Israel

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

Everybody knows that Israel is covered unfairly by the international press. But can this atrocious bias be quantified?

 

It turns out it can, according to a new study by Jeremy Musighi.

 

The study, called Center of Attention, uses something called the GDELT Project’s Global Knowledge Graph (GKG), an open global news index in 65 languages going back to 2015. The study tracks the location and subject of a story and assesses its relative positivity or negativity. There are additional interesting indicators, such as what kind of sources are quoted. In the end, the sampling includes nearly 15 million articles.

 

Altogether it paints a clear picture of the nature of the world’s obsession with the one Jewish state.

 

In counting mentions of a particular country, that country’s home-based publications are excluded—this is a study of how the rest of the world covers Israel and other states. Likewise, foreign-based outlets that primarily cover Israel-related topics are also excluded.

 

The study looked at the past 10 years. In nine of those 10 years, Israel was the most-talked-about subject. The exception was 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine.

 

A truly fascinating year is 2019, when there was no conflict in Israel and thus no built-in newsworthiness advantage. According to the study, “1 of every 112 international articles was primarily about Israel (0.89%).” During times of conflict, Israel can attract more than triple the attention of the nearest competitor.

 

Where does that news glut come from, primarily? In quiet years like 2019, the focus on Israel is held steady by outlets in Muslim-majority states more than in Western states, though the latter still contribute a quarter of all the stories.

 

That is perhaps to be expected. But when there is conflict involving Israel, the majority shifts to Western outlets. In peacetime (such as it is), the Muslim world ensures Israel’s negative coverage continues. When a conflict breaks out, which is often, everyone else jumps in with their own negative coverage.

 

The study contains a couple of interesting nuggets. For example, in 2024, BBC News mentioned Israel in 6 percent of airtime, accounting for a mention every 17 minutes.

 

And although Israel’s share of airtime will naturally increase at moments of major conflict outbreaks, the Jewish state still accrued outsize attention. At each country’s peak, Israel still consumed news agencies’ attention at a far higher pace. October 7, 2023, was Israel’s measured peak, up against the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the evacuation from Kabul in 2021, and other notable conflicts.

 

There is an opportunity cost to the world’s Israel-obsession. And that opportunity cost—what could have been covered instead but wasn’t—produces perhaps the saddest and most damning statistic in the entire study: “Tigray — the deadliest war of the decade — never reached 0.03% of airtime on any day, so a ‘% of peak’ curve for it would be percent of nothing; that absence is the finding.” The deadliest war of the decade and one that included an ostentatious genocidal campaign doesn’t rate. By contrast, “Israel after Oct 7 held above 1% of all cable airtime on 344 of the next 365 days, averaged 5.65% for the full year … and at one year was [still] rising.”

 

In print media specifically, “Israel’s floor … is a level other small countries touch only in the worst week of their history.”

 

Restricting the study to only Western outlets in order to test the tone of the reporting produces more grim results. In 2019, when there was no conflict in Israel, the Jewish state was covered about as negatively as Russia and North Korea. In 2024, a war year, the tone of Western coverage of Israel was 78% negative. That is, Israel was covered more negatively than Russia, Iran or Syria in the Western press. Arab and Muslim media therefore aren’t the cause of Israel’s press negativity; “the West’s own register is the darkest part of the composite.”

 

Musighi then compares the level of news coverage Israel receives with Wikipedia searches, just to get a sense of whether the media’s fascination with the Jewish state is matched by the general public’s. After all, Wikipedia can tell us how often people choose to read about Israel. The answer: The media’s obsession with Israel is notably more intense than the public’s.

 

That is the global media’s herd mentality on display, as well as the disconnect between the elites and the public. We see this also when looking at specific events that spur large amounts of media coverage. For example: International organizations produce a lot of garbage dressed up as “reports” on Israel, yet each time they release one, the media covers it like it’s the moon landing.

 

The study is a valuable look at the inner workings of the media’s manufactured obsession with Israel and the consequences—chief among them, I’d suggest, is the amount of preventable deaths that might have been saved by some of the world’s attention and resources. When the media have Jews on the brain, everybody suffers.