Fog of war journalism

Since the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and during Israel’s now three-year-long retaliation against Gaza, the questioning of how this conflict has been reported has intensified. Journalism’s traditional commitment to objectivity has been on trial. By contrast, before the outbreak of the latest iteration of the Israel–Gaza war, the Russian military attack on Ukraine was reported largely without popular criticism. As a result of the difference in how the reportage of both wars has been characterised – one as biased, the other as justified – CMT undertook a study of the framing choices made by four Australian media outlets in their coverage of these wars.   

We surveyed the news outputs of The Australian, the ABC, The Guardian, and 9News.com.au over specified, high-profile events, to gauge how each dealt with the dominant narratives emerging from the main parties to the conflicts. 

Our results show greater framing plurality and change over time in the coverage of the Israel–Gaza war. All but one of the media outlets we surveyed, at first, closely engaged with Israeli narratives, and, as the conflict progressed, amplified the humanitarian consequences to the Palestinians. The Australian was the only outlet to continually privilege Israeli perspectives, particularly of Israel’s victimhood, security, and self-defence and to marginalise those of the Palestinians, including historical background across the articles we sampled. The Australian was also the only outlet to align pro-Palestinian advocacy with narratives of antisemitism and social division.

In coverage of the Russia–Ukraine war, our results show distinct asymmetry in engagement with and treatment of the narratives emerging from both sides. Western and Ukrainian narratives were continuously dominant across coverage by all four outlets surveyed, predominantly voiced by Western and Ukrainian sources, while Russian narratives received limited and more often no interpretive authority. As a result, narratives supported by Western governments were privileged, whilst historical and geopolitical complexity was significantly downplayed.

More research is needed to discover whether the reportage of either conflict could reasonably be categorised as advocacy reporting. Researchers would need to speak to the journalists involved to interrogate motive and their journalistic norms and practices. But certainly, the source privileging and selective framing we observed in this study are the hallmark of advocacy journalism. Conflict is one of the most difficult and contentious of news stories to cover. Information is either scarce or propagandistic, and propaganda can come even from the side more accurately characterised as the victim. Add to this the broader geopolitical arguments and imperatives which often accompany war, and unpolluted information can be hard to find. 

Even when there is broad consensus in support of one side and in opposition to the other – as there is in relation to Russia’s war on Ukraine – or polarised responses around Israel–Gaza, where violations of international humanitarian law have been documented against Palestinians and Israel during the Hamas attack, the journalistic obligation to analyse and engage viewpoints with which journalists may not agree or accept does not simply disappear in the practice of objective journalism. The obligation can, of course, disappear in the practice of advocacy journalism, which permits the selection of sources that the journalist deems supportive of a particular argument, allowing one side’s interpretation to become embedded as a default perspective. The question then becomes – is this journalism? 

Read the report.