Using a brand new account, I put two questions to ChatGPT (a computing system that gives people answers based on a summary of huge amounts of publicly accessible information).
This is why I care about fair journalism, why I care about headlines that say Palestinians “died” and Israelis were “killed” – because we are documenting the present for future artificial intelligence, algorithms and government policies and calculations for how many bombs to buy and where to send them to. ChatGPT, like all artificial intelligence, has been taught by us. We have a responsibility to be thoughtful about how we use our words and to think critically about the words we’re reading, even the ones presented by supposedly neutral sources.
All people deserve justice. But real justice can’t be had if “it’s complicated” for some of us but not for others.
The New York Times has consistently mentioned Israeli deaths more often than Palestinian deaths. What’s more, their coverage of Israeli deaths is *increasing* as more Palestinians are dying. Israeli deaths have been mentioned the most in the past few days, even though Israeli deaths have plateaued since 10/12 and Palestinian deaths have skyrocketed
Please read the notes below on this data – it’s crucial context.
📎 In addition to the bias in sheer volume of coverage, there was a huge difference in the language used. The word “slaughter” was used 53 times in these articles since 10/7 to describe the deaths of Israelis and zero times to describe the death of Palestinians. The word “massacre” shows up 24 times in reference to Israelis and once in reference to Palestinians.
📎 The articles rarely mention the names of Palestinians who die — instead using terms like “mourner”, “resident”, “assailant” or “militant”.
📎 In one article, a murdered Palestinian was simply referred to as the “bloodied corpse” of a presumed terrorist. This is still counted as a mention of a Palestinian death in the data despite the framing. Israelis who died were often mentioned individually and by name with reference to their families and professions which humanized them in comparison to anonymous Palestinians.
Sources: This data was compiled and analyzed by Holly Jackson, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley based on 991 New York Times articles posted between 10/7 and 10/18. The articles were selected if they contained any of the keywords: Palestine, Israel, Palestinian, and Israeli. 500 articles were automatically tagged to have mentions of death or words related to death. Holly read all death related sentences in these articles and tagged whether the sentence was talking about Palestinians, Israelis, both, or neither (i.e. something unrelated).
The data on deaths is from OCHA (but Palestinians are struggling to count and register deaths so their numbers are likely to be an undercount).
While Israeli victims are documented as people who were loved, Palestinians are uprooted, even in death. They’re not described as fathers or mothers, daughters or sons – they’re simply dead bodies. This summary doesn’t fully capture all the dehumanisation that is often present in the language of journalism. For example, Palestinian deaths are often mentioned in the context of vengeance (“retaliation”/“retaliatory”/“retaliated” appear 190 times in this dataset) and, unlike Israeli deaths/hostages, these victims are rarely mentioned by name.
Here are some specific examples of how BBC News uses language to minimize Palestinian suffering:
* “Some 1,200 people have been killed in Israel, while more than 1,000 have died in retaliatory air strikes on Gaza.”
* “Israelis reject any comparison between the way Hamas kills civilians and the way Palestinian civilians die in their air strikes.”
There are only a few words where Palestinians get more mentions; “killed”, “died” (hardly surprising given that the Palestinian death toll is about 25x higher than the Israeli one at this point) and “wife” (again, I don’t find this surprising since the media is always much more interested in Arab patriarchies than Western ones).
This analysis is based on the majority of published BBC articles relating to Palestine/Israel, scraped between 10/7 and 12/2 by Jan Lietava (@yan.json) and Dana Najjar (@jarz_d), including 672 articles and 4404 posts in livefeeds. 1485 documents were automatically tagged as containing sentences relating to death, which were then individually read and manually tagged, based on whether they talked about Palestinians, Israelis, both or neither. The sentences were then filtered by mentions of words in the table above.
It’s awful that antisemitism is so prevalent and Zionism is so powerful that I need to state the obvious: of course Israeli citizens don’t deserve to die, no matter the policies of the government they live under. And I also refuse to characterize an attack that takes place within a context of apartheid as “unprovoked” or a “surprise”. There is a system of oppression used by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people that is designed to create suffering and suffocation, to rob people of their dignity and their rights. It is a system that has been in place for years and has been dialed up on a daily basis. If that isn’t a provocation I don’t know what is.
It’s awful that antisemitism is so prevalent and Zionism is so powerful that I need to state the obvious: of course Israeli citizens don’t deserve to die, no matter the policies of the government they live under. And I also refuse to characterize an attack that takes place within a context of apartheid as “unprovoked” or a “surprise”. There is a system of oppression used by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people that is designed to create suffering and suffocation, to rob people of their dignity and their rights. It is a system that has been in place for years and has been dialed up on a daily basis. If that isn’t a provocation I don’t know what is.
Checking neutrality on @bbcnews.
Their coverage has consistently shown a disproportionate bias towards Israeli deaths rather than Palestinian ones. These lines in the top chart are largely unaffected by the mounting Palestinian death toll shown in the bottom chart.
If you look close at that bottom chart, you’ll see that the cumulative Israeli deaths declined on November 10. That’s because Israeli officials revised down their estimate of victims from 1,400 to 1,200. On December 15, the estimate was revised down again to 695 civilians and 373 members of security forces.
This analysis is based on the majority of published BBC articles relating to Palestine/Israel, scraped between 10/7 and 12/2 by Jan Lietava (@yan.json) and Dana Najjar (@jarz_d), including 672 articles and 4,404 posts in livefeeds. 1,485 documents were automatically tagged as containing sentences relating to death, which were then individually read and manually tagged, based on whether they talked about Palestinians, Israelis, both or neither.
You might not be able to control your government’s budget between elections but you can control how you spend your money.
In 2020, US customs said that products made in illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land could now be labelled “Made In Israel” instead of “Made in the West Bank/Gaza”. This change from the US government formalized and legitimized theft.
The UN has published a list of 97 companies that have business in or with these settlements. I’ll link to the full report in my stories and then save it as a highlight. I made this illustration in 2021 so I’ve updated it to include a few additional companies (McDonalds handed out thousands of free meals to Israeli soldiers this week).
Boycotting works. In 2022, General Mills (the company that makes Cheerios, Häagen-Dazs, Yoplait, Larabar and so much more) decided to divest from the Israeli occupation after a lot of international pressure. AirBnb initially said that they wouldn’t be offering up vacation homes on stolen land but then they quietly reversed their decision.
Sources: United Nations report A/HRC/43/71, United Nations Human RIghts office of the high commissioner, June 2023 as well as media reporting on Starbucks’ and McDonalds’ recent support of Israel.
You might not be able to control your government’s budget between elections but you can control how you spend your money.
In 2020, US customs said that products made in illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land could now be labelled “Made In Israel” instead of “Made in the West Bank/Gaza”. This change from the US government formalized and legitimized theft.
The UN has published a list of 97 companies that have business in or with these settlements. I’ll link to the full report in my stories and then save it as a highlight. I made this illustration in 2021 so I’ve updated it to include a few additional companies (McDonalds handed out thousands of free meals to Israeli soldiers this week).
Boycotting works. In 2022, General Mills (the company that makes Cheerios, Häagen-Dazs, Yoplait, Larabar and so much more) decided to divest from the Israeli occupation after a lot of international pressure. AirBnb initially said that they wouldn’t be offering up vacation homes on stolen land but then they quietly reversed their decision.
Sources: United Nations report A/HRC/43/71, United Nations Human RIghts office of the high commissioner, June 2023 as well as media reporting on Starbucks’ and McDonalds’ recent support of Israel.
At least five of the 21 members of Columbia’s board seem to have a personal interest in crushing student protests (a reminder: students are demanding that their university divest from Israeli genocide and the occupation of Palestine).
Some other notes:
• Although he’s the cousin of Penny Pritzker (she’s on the board at Harvard, forced Claudine Gay out of her job) and nephew of Governor JB Pritzker (said he stands “unequivocally” with Israel), I didn’t include Columbia trustee Adam Pritzker here. Interestingly though, Adam appears to have only one online account which is on Cellar Tracker, a site for wine lovers. On April 21, a few days after the NYPD had begun their crackdown on peaceful protests at Columbia, Adam was reviewing a white wine noting its “nice bouquet of citrus and melon”. The wine producer, “Yatir Creek” is an Israeli producer that operates out of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
• Some students have claimed that HEICO is part of Columbia’s endowment. The first demand made by SJP is for transparency because it’s not clear what the university has invested in.
• Jeh Johnson is also the former Secretary of Homeland Security.
• And lastly, if you don’t think that the use of AI and surveillance in Israel is frightening, please read reporting from Spencer Ackerman about how autonomous systems have been used by the Israeli military to fire on Palestinian civilians.
Sources: All public records, including trustee bios on the Columbia website.
Last week, faculty at several New York universities organized the People’s Graduation because so many ceremonies were moved or cancelled (the President of Columbia was more interested in hosting cops on campus than her students). I’m so grateful to have been there. Unfortunately, I started ugly crying when I saw the faces of the Palestinian journalists in the crowd and could barely get the words from my mouth to the mic. I’m not going to say something trite like “I’m proud of these kids” – I’m mostly just sad and bitter that this class got too old too soon. They had to spend their educational time teaching people who should know better.
As a thank you, I made this limited edition print as a gift for the class of 2024. Only the good got them.
75 days compared to 75 years
About 1.9 million people in Gaza have been displaced since October 7 (that’s over 85% of the total population). But this conflict didn’t start on October 7. Most Gazans were already refugees – 1.7 million of them had been pushed out of their homes and villages *before* October. Now, they’re refugees for the second time (at least).
Source: United Nations, 2023 (note that this is probably an underestimate. Not everyone registers with the United Nations as a refugee, so the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has a higher total number of 6.4 million)
75 days compared to 75 years
About 1.9 million people in Gaza have been displaced since October 7 (that’s over 85% of the total population). But this conflict didn’t start on October 7. Most Gazans were already refugees – 1.7 million of them had been pushed out of their homes and villages *before* October. Now, they’re refugees for the second time (at least).
Source: United Nations, 2023 (note that this is probably an underestimate. Not everyone registers with the United Nations as a refugee, so the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has a higher total number of 6.4 million)
Source: ACLED fatality data, 2023
Source: ACLED fatality data, 2023
At the time I’m writing this, over half of the people who live in Gaza have been forced out of their homes (1.4 million people according to a UN update issued less than 24 hours ago).
This is ethnic cleansing.
Take a look at New York, where weed is skanky and sometimes dangerous. This month, the state’s cannabis control board voted to expand license applications to everyone. This is why they did it… (I’m trying a new style of explaining outliers for @guardian)
Take a look at New York, where weed is skanky and sometimes dangerous. This month, the state’s cannabis control board voted to expand license applications to everyone. This is why they did it… (I’m trying a new style of explaining outliers for @guardian)
I was going to draw people on toilets simultaneously eating and pooing but I didn’t think you’d keep swiping.
Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009-2015
I was going to draw people on toilets simultaneously eating and pooing but I didn’t think you’d keep swiping.
Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009-2015
I was going to draw people on toilets simultaneously eating and pooing but I didn’t think you’d keep swiping.
Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009-2015
I was going to draw people on toilets simultaneously eating and pooing but I didn’t think you’d keep swiping.
Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009-2015
I was going to draw people on toilets simultaneously eating and pooing but I didn’t think you’d keep swiping.
Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009-2015
I was going to draw people on toilets simultaneously eating and pooing but I didn’t think you’d keep swiping.
Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009-2015