Tatiana Glezer: "95 per cent of journalists cite data from the Gaza Ministry of Health - that is, Hamas"

Tatiana Glezer: “95 per cent of journalists cite data from the Gaza Ministry of Health – that is, Hamas”

Fifty Global, an international group of scholars, analysed 1,378 stories in the world’s leading media outlets about the victims of the Gaza war. It turned out that 85 per cent of these publications did not distinguish between fighters and civilians, and 95 per cent used data on Palestinian deaths provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas. Why are reputable publications using inaccurate information and what can Israel do to counter this? T-invariant spoke to the initiator of the study – sociologist, graduate of the Theodore Shanin Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences Tatiana Glezer.

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T-invariant: In early 2025, The New York Times published an interview with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. During the conversation, journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro, prefacing a question about events in Gaza, says: “…Israel’s response has been extreme. The latest UN figures put the Palestinian death toll at 45,000. More than 90 per cent of the population of Gaza has been displaced. People are starving. Hospitals have been destroyed. In November, the UN released a report calling Israel’s military action “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” <… > Entire neighbourhoods have been levelled to the ground. And at the heart of it all is the fact that the United States is supplying so many weapons to Israel. Bombs weighing a tonne that have killed Palestinian civilians have been vetted by the State Department.” This approach and this point of view has been absolutely typical of the world’s leading publications for over a year now since the most tragic date of 7 October 2023. Do I understand correctly that this is what made you gather dozens of volunteer scholars from different countries and draw attention to the violation of the standards of professional journalism in the coverage of the war?

Tatiana Glezer: Exactly. After the attack on 7 October, as always, I read different international media: CNN, BBC, The New York Times. I read them both before the war started in Ukraine and after the war started, just to have several views from different perspectives on one event. And after the 7th of October, I was amazed that I didn’t see the same kind of reporting that I think I saw on the eve of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict. And I noticed that the world’s leading media constantly failed to specify that Israel was at war with Hamas militants, that general figures on casualties were constantly given without specifying how many of the dead were militants, which the Israel Defence Forces figures indicated. Before our eyes, these figures quickly became part of the general narrative describing the events in Gaza, and then famous journalists, politicians and bloggers began to use them. As a result, this data became a weapon in the information war.

Then I shared the idea of analysing the world’s leading media outlets, which set the tone of coverage of war events, with my friends and colleagues Viktor Vakhshtayn and Alex Zernopolsky from the International Institute for Socio-Legal Studies. They supported me, and I set up a small volunteer group. In February 2024, we selected 211 sources and saw that only 3% of the publications quoted figures from the Israel Defence Forces, and the remaining 97% of the publications did not specify at all how many fighters were among the total number of people killed in Gaza. We realised that we had every reason to continue the research. And by the end of May, we had selected 1,378 sources from eight publications: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post. The Guardian, the Australian Broadcasting Company, Reuters and the Associated Press.

T-i: Why did you choose these particular media outlets?

TG: Because they are reputable top publications and the world’s leading news outlets. The total daily reach of all these publications is 115 million people. And it is clear that the daily repetition of the same thing to a huge audience forms a narrative. And if we add to this the number of publications that are reposted on Twitter and in social networks, the figure is even higher. These media have a huge influence on public opinion.

Info

According to the American research centre Henry Jackson Society, the Gaza Ministry of Health regularly falsified figures on war casualties in the region. A comparison of documents identifying the dead showed that men were turned into women, adults into children, and Palestinians killed by Hamas militants were added to the lists of those killed by the Israel Defence Forces. In addition, the 5,000 people who die each year in Gaza from natural causes, such as terminal or chronic diseases, were also counted as war casualties. The report also shows significant discrepancies in the number of men, women and children who die, as provided by various sources inside Gaza (hospital registrations, reports from families of the dead, data from the Ministry of Health itself). These media outlets have a huge influence on public opinion.

T-i: How did you design the research?

TG: We allocated a unit of “research object” – quotations where the total number of victims was given. We tried to clean these quotes from the husks as much as possible. For example, in some cases they consisted of one sentence, in some cases of two sentences. And we made sure to see whether the article mentioned the number of fighters in the same quote or whether it was mentioned separately somewhere else. We tried to be as accurate as possible. Then, when we collected all these quotations, the question arose as to which code groups to categorise them into. And this was probably the most important work, because we first built one variant of codings, then we realised that it did not suit us in terms of logic. We ended up breaking the codes into three subgroups. The first group is how victim information is presented. The second is how the sources are presented. The third is, roughly speaking, everything else: judgements, statements of journalists. Now the Henry Jackson Society report presents data from the first two groups. We have not analysed the third group yet, because it contains a lot of statements that are not directly related to the sources. But we will definitely analyse them further.

Operation in Gaza. Photo: IDF Press Service

T-i: What sources did you analyse?

TG: We have several groups of sources. Firstly, data from the Israeli side. Officials, Netanyahu, the Israel Defence Forces – everything that pointed to Israel as a source of information. Second, a group of codes that referred to Hamas and to Gaza as a source of information. Third, data from the Gaza Ministry of Health. And then we also had a group of sources on international organisations: UN, World Kitchen, World Health Organisation.

And we saw that 95 per cent of journalists refer to data from the Gaza Ministry of Health – that is, Hamas. 2% or 3% refer to international organisations – which again quote Hamas figures. So the information is mainly coming from Hamas. And in only 3 per cent of cases is Israel mentioned as a source of information. It should be clarified that the Gaza Ministry of Health presents general figures without specifying how many of the dead are militants, terrorists, and how many are civilians. But the Israel Defence Forces also speaks only about militants, without taking civilians into account (this is explained by the lack of possibility to count all the dead civilians).

T-i: Here is a BBC news excerpt from 7 October 2024 “More than 1,200 Israelis were killed in an unprecedented attack on 7 October. Around 250 more were taken hostage by militants. Nearly 42,000 people have been killed since the military operation began in the Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian authorities, and most of Gaza’s 202 million residents have been rendered homeless.” We see in this publication that Israeli casualties are counted as of 7 October 2023, and Palestinian casualties from Gaza are taken as of autumn 2024, which is the whole year. And this news does not provide data on Israeli soldiers killed in a year of war, on Israeli civilians killed by shelling and terrorist attacks, on how many Israelis were left homeless and became refugees as a result of fighting in the South and North of Israel. Are you and your colleagues going to analyse, in addition to the accuracy of the figures, the correctness of their presentation?

TG: Yes, in this news we see that both sides are quoted, but they use data that is not comparable. When we were collecting BBC data, we noticed that this is their standard technique. They say it started with so many Israelis killed on the 7th of October and then so many Gazans were killed. But we’re not going to include that in our research yet, because analysing the comparability of the data is not the answer to our question of whether militants are mentioned.

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Our main question was a simple one: ‘Are militants mentioned in the casualty pool?’ Because their systematic omission leads to a distortion of the narrative and a shift in the focus of the war: it appears that Israel is not fighting militants or the Hamas terrorist organisation, but civilians.

T-i: How do you and your colleagues assess Israel’s information policy during the war? What role did it play in the world media adopting a pro-Palestinian narrative?

TG: Israel has traditionally not tried to communicate its point of view to the world community. And that position has its own explanation. I’ve talked to a huge number of Israelis born here, and they all say roughly the same thing: It’s useless to explain anything to anyone, because everyone is against us. And this learned helplessness affects the actions of the organisations that are supposed to be involved in communicating their position to the international community. Hence another problem: it is very difficult to obtain Israeli data on the dead. Israel provides data if a journalist contacts the press office of the Israel Defence Forces, which requires some effort on the part of journalists. And the situation is quite different with Hamas data: you go to the website and you see it immediately, it is updated every fortnight. And if a journalist needs to get the figures quickly, they don’t have the same quick access to Israeli data.

In addition, there’s a point about ethics. Few people know outside of Israel that in our country there is a special, great respect for the dead, for the families of the dead and the hostages. That is why Israel releases a limited amount of photographs and other information about the circumstances of the deaths. And all materials dedicated to the victims are published only with the permission of their families. Of course, Israel loses out to Gaza in terms of gaining the world’s empathy, from where a huge number of photos and videos are instantly disseminated.

T-i: There is a popular Israeli communication formula: “It’s not words that speak for us, it’s deeds that speak for us”. And it is often cited to explain why Israel doesn’t talk about how things are really going, how Israel is fighting the war and how the people of Israel are surviving the war. Do you think that your study, which showed the distortion of information about the war, will have an impact on the attitude of Israelis who are responsible for communications policy, on how Israel will start to tell its own story?

Operation in Gaza. Photo: IDF Press Office

TG: I don’t. I was surprised that our study was talked about so much in the English-speaking and Russian-speaking media environment. But it goes virtually unnoticed in the Hebrew-speaking community. I’ve heard from native Israelis, “We always knew that information about us was distorted, there’s nothing sensational here.” But I know that recently a former speaker from the IDF was on the Piers Morgan show, and he quoted our research data. And the IDF quoted it too. But will the conclusions be drawn? There are a lot of things that need to change in Israel in order to work operationally in the media sector: goals, objectives, management. We are now trying very hard to be heard in Israel, but so far there is no such feeling.

T-i: So it turns out that it is the Hebrew-language media environment that is the most difficult to break into?

TG: Yes, surprisingly enough. Although this study is not so much about Israel, but about standards of journalistic ethics and how conflicts are covered in general. I didn’t start it because I came to live in Israel and now I have to defend it. I am absolutely convinced that if I saw the same situation, let’s say, in the other direction, I would be just as motivated to see what was going on.

T-i: What was the biggest surprise for you during the research process?

TG: That communicating the results was more difficult than conducting it. We met deafness on the part of journalists – even from those who were interested in the research topic. We were puzzled: why?! Of course, some people simply did not want to raise this topic, because it was a rather loud accusation against the world’s leading media. Some people did not want to be involved in confirming the research. After all, we have a large database, and we sent it to everyone who expressed any interest. But apparently it was difficult for people to understand it (even though it is as transparent as possible).

One major publication was ready to publish the results of the study. And then they changed their mind because they found the same data errors and didn’t want to discredit themselves. A journalist friend of mine from another very large publication, when she heard my story about how we got through to the press, waved her hands: “It’s some kind of general silent conspiracy.

T-i: There’s a famous formula: “The bolder your hypothesis, the stronger your evidence must be.” How are you going to strengthen your evidence base?

TG: We’re going to put our evidence base on our website now , and everyone can see what we’ve done, count everything. Then we want to expand the research and take on the third block, which I’ve already mentioned, and apply more sophisticated methods of analysing the data there. That is why we have collected such a large sample. So we could have limited ourselves, in principle, to a smaller number of sources. But we have collected almost 1400 and this will allow us to analyse narratives more seriously. And, as for practical application, we will bring our data to all the publications that participated in our research and will ask them to indicate their official position. By the way, the BBC – the absolute anti-leader among all the media we analysed – has already responded to the Henry Jackson Society’s appeal. They explained their informational approach by saying that it is very difficult to cover the figures from the Israeli side because Israel does not allow foreign journalists in. To which we can only object: this did not prevent the BBC from quoting Hamas figures in toto, nor from drawing attention to the fact that Hamas does not distinguish between militants and civilians.

T-i: Have you received any reaction from Palestinian organisations?

TG: Hussam Zomlot, head of the Palestinian Mission in the UK, called our research “morally repugnant.” I also studied the reactions from the Palestinian side on Twitter: I was interested in the argumentation system. And I noticed that those who take the pro-Palestinian side always appeal to emotion, with little or no argument. In fact, this is the basis for much of the Palestinian propaganda.

T-i: Do you plan to analyse how Israeli casualties and Israeli losses are covered in the world media in future stages of the research? Will the information that is available exclusively inside Israel be broadcast to the big world media?

TG: This is an interesting topic, and it could be the occasion for another paper. When we were doing the research, I kept noticing that events in Israel – the daily shelling from Lebanon, the terrorist attacks, the hundreds of thousands of displaced people – are not mentioned in the media, it’s as if they don’t exist. And when something happens in Gaza, it is always covered extremely quickly. It is important to compare this, but we are not yet in a state where we can think about everything at once. Although we understand how important it is to analyse it.

T-i: We started our conversation with you by saying that you noticed the difference in the way the world media covered Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the way the same media covered the attack on Israel. Now how do you explain this difference: two wars are going on at the same time and the media coverage is completely different.

TG: When I was preparing for this paper, I read materials on media framing. And one study said that the Arab-Israeli conflict is traditionally a magnet for journalists and public opinion. Why – it’s hard to say. And simple explanations about anti-Semitism can hardly be limited to it. For example, there was a study in the early 2000s on the Jenin conflict (Evans, M. (2010). Framing international conflicts: Media coverage of fighting in the Middle East. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 6(2), 209-233). And it shows that the very local conflict in Jenin received more media coverage (the author, by the way, analysed the same media as we did) than the total number of references to conflicts in Africa over the whole period of time. In other words, a large number of armed conflicts on the entire continent were overshadowed and took up less space in the media than one conflict in Jenin. Moreover, the texts about the Jenin conflict were more voluminous in comparison to those about other conflicts.

T-i: There is one unpleasant similarity in the reaction to media coverage of conflicts in Israel and in Russia. The Kremlin always has one explanation for why the world media do not write about the actions of the Russian authorities in a way that the Kremlin likes: they don’t like Russia. But we often see a similar reaction in Israel: they write about us because they don’t like us. Don’t you find this strange?

TG: I think the difference here is that the Russian authorities use the idea of “we are not loved” for internal consolidation. And this idea did not correspond to reality, at least before the war in Ukraine. At that time, interest in Russian culture, science, and society was growing. And I remember well that in the run-up to the war with Ukraine, I read carefully what CNN and BBC were writing about the position of Russia and Ukraine, and I was struck by the fact that they were quite unbiased in their coverage of the situation on both sides. So after 7 October, I was amazed. If the Arab-Israeli conflict had been covered in the same way as the war in Ukraine, the world would have known about the regular shelling from Lebanon and Gaza that began long before 7 October, about the weekly terrorist attacks inside Israel in recent years. And now every step of Israel’s defence is being examined as if under a microscope. And, of course, this can’t help but affect how Israel is perceived in the world.

I have two friends who live in England and Holland. Both of them take the pro-Palestinian side. And I try to tell them how we live, about our daily life: “We have 11,000 rockets coming from Gaza right now”. And they say to me, “That can’t be. Where did Gaza get so many rockets?”. It’s amazing and it needs to be explored.

T-i: How do you and your colleagues define for yourselves the most serious impact of this research? What needs to change?

TG: I think everyone’s motivation is different, but we agree on values and objectives: it’s important for us that the standards of professional journalism are respected. Personally, that’s the message I want to convey. I graduated from Shaninka. I was lucky enough to study under the wonderful Russian scientist Gennady Batygin, who taught me the methodology of social sciences. I was taught data analysis by Alexander Kryshtanovsky. I was taught by amazing professors: Alexander Filippov, Vadim Radaev, and other wonderful specialists. And thanks to my studies at Shanynka, I got an idea of what scientific knowledge is, how facts should be presented, and what responsibility a researcher bears. They explained to us how research standards are formed, how they should be conducted, how easy it is to manipulate public opinion based on the same data. And somehow I thought that in journalism the standards should be the same. But after 7 October there was a collapse of my ideas about journalism. And I want to bring this issue to the journalistic community so that journalistic standards can be formed and brought to some kind of codes. Freedom of speech should imply responsibility for facts. And these facts in complex conflicts should be provided by both sides. And if the facts are unverifiable or questionable, it should always be reported. Standards of ethics should be formed on some basic things that have nothing to do with personal opinion.