A Yale study says the New York Times is biased against Israel. Its own tables show the paper gave a dead Israeli 25 times the coverage of a dead Palestinian.

On 7 September 2026 a Yale professor published a study saying the New York Times told the story of Gaza in a way that was unfair to Israel. Israel National News called it proof of “deep and systematic” anti-Israel bias. The Times of Israel called it peer-reviewed proof of “bias against Israel”. It has been passed around as the damning study ever since.

We read it. All twenty-two pages. Every number about the New York Times on this page is copied from the study’s own tables. We changed nothing. We did one thing the author never did: we divided by the dead. That is all it takes.

The headline finding is that the Times does not both-sides a genocide every time it reports it

Here is the study’s big finding with the jargon removed. It went through 1,559 Times articles from 7 October 2023 to 7 June 2024 and counted how many describe the situation like this: Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October and killed Israelis. Israel’s response has killed many Palestinians. And that is it. No line on Israeli soldiers killed since. No line on Hamas fighters killed. 969 articles describe it that way. The study calls that

“a distorted view of the conflict, namely that Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing many Israelis, and this led to Israeli violence that has been killing only Palestinian civilians since then with no further Israeli deaths.”

Pinker, page 9

Read that description again. It is what happened. The complaint is that when the Times reported Israel killing forty people in a school, it did not add a paragraph on how many Israeli soldiers had died that month and how many of the dead the Israeli army says were fighters. The study’s headline statistic is a count of how often the Times declined to append a justification to a massacre. The question is loaded before the counting starts: why are you not justifying the killing?

And the Times was already doing plenty of it. 57% of the 532 articles about events on the ground mention the Israelis killed on 7 October. 57% mention the hostages. Eight months in, with Palestinians dying at 151 a day, more than half of every ground report still opened with the 7 October preamble. The author’s complaint is that the other 43% did not.

Divide by the dead

The study compares Israel against the Palestinians as if they were two teams with a similar number of dead. They are not. In the study’s own window Israel killed 31 Palestinians for every Israeli killed on 7 October, and 23 for every Israeli killed in the whole period, soldiers included. So the question is not who got mentioned more. It is how much coverage each dead person got. Take the study’s own Table 1 and the Gaza Ministry of Health count on the study’s last day, 7 June 2024, and divide.

A dead Israeli on 7 October got 25 times the coverage of a dead Palestinian: 254 articles per thousand dead against 10. A dead Israeli soldier, the group the study says the Times ignored, got 16 times: 162 per thousand. Each hostage got 1.2 articles, which is more than a thousand dead Palestinians got between them. That is not bias against Israel. That is the most pro-Israel coverage a newspaper can produce while still admitting Palestinians exist.

It is not a quirk of one table. Across all 1,559 articles, 643 mention the 7 October dead and 801 mention Palestinian dead, and the ratio per victim is the same, 25 to 1. The personal stories the study complains about hardest run the same way: 111 personal stories for 1,590 Israeli dead, 207 for 36,731 Palestinian dead. 12 to 1, in Israel’s favour. The study presents the 207 as excess.

The count is a floor, so the real gap is worse

Everything above uses the Gaza Ministry of Health count, because it is the lowest number anyone credible uses. It is a floor. The count stands at 73,670 on 10 September 2026, 20,179 of them children, and every independent study says it is a massive undercount.

Apply the Lancet’s undercount to the study’s own window and 36,731 becomes about 62,316. The gap becomes 42 to 1. Use the ministry count and it is 25 to 1. Use the Lancet and it is 42 to 1. There is no count of the dead on which the New York Times comes out favouring Palestinians. There is only a choice of how badly it favoured Israel.

“Never more than five days without a Palestinian story”

This is the study’s favourite finding, and it is written up as a scandal: a Times reader “will never go more than five days in a row” without a story about one Palestinian’s suffering. Think about what that sentence is complaining about. Over those 244 days Israel killed 151 Palestinians a day. The Times ran one personal story for every 225 dead. On the 81 days without one, about 12,193 Palestinians were killed and the Times told none of their stories. The study’s complaint is that there were not more days like that.

Its own Table 3 gives the number it does not draw out. On 128 days an Israeli soldier died, and the Times mentioned it on 61 of them: 48%. On all 244 days Palestinians died, and the Times ran an article whose topic was Palestinian suffering on 116 of them: 48%. The same rate. The difference is that a quiet day for the Israeli army was one dead soldier and a quiet day in Gaza was a hundred dead children.

Israel-only articles and Palestine-only articles: the same number

Table 2, the study’s own count. 231 articles mention Israeli victims and no Palestinian victims. 237 mention Palestinian victims without 7 October. 231 against 237, in a period when the dead were 23 to 1. The Times was exactly as likely to write an article where the only victims were Israeli as one where the only victims were Palestinian. The study reports the second number as a problem and never puts the first beside it. That is the method in one line: count the thing that helps, leave out the thing that does not.

The rocket section is the study arguing against itself

Three pages are spent on the first weeks, complaining that between 8 October and 2 November 2023 the Times mentioned Palestinian rocket fire on only 12 of 26 days and rarely listed the Israeli injuries. The study reproduces them from a database: a woman seriously injured in Ashkelon, a boy hit by shrapnel, five people lightly injured at Nirim, two foreign workers killed at Magen, one person killed in Sderot.

In the nine days that table covers, 8 to 16 October, Israel killed 2,808 Palestinians, 853 of them children. By 2 November, when the study’s rocket window closes, it had killed 9,061. The study’s grievance is that “5 others were lightly injured” did not get the same prominence as that. Nobody reading that table honestly comes away thinking the Times was unfair to Israel.

Counting the word “Israel” proves the Times quotes Israel constantly

“Israel” appears 27,205 times across the articles and “Hamas” 8,499 times, and the study says this “diminishes the responsibility of Hamas”.

Israel is a state. It has a government, a cabinet, a prime minister, an army with a spokesman, a border, a parliament, settlers, hostages and an embassy in every capital. “Israel said.” “The Israeli military said.” “Israel denies.” “Israeli strikes.” Every one of those is a hit. Hamas has no adjective, no ministry and no press officer the Times rings for comment. The study does not even say whether “Israeli” was counted as a hit on “Israel”. If it was, the number is junk. If it was not, the number is a count of how often the Times printed the Israeli government’s claims. Either way it is the opposite of what the study says it is.

The study then finds the same ratio for Hezbollah and Iran and thinks it has proved the point. It has. Those articles are about Israel bombing Lebanon and Iran. The Times sees the whole region through Israel. That is the pro-Israel finding.

Nobody can count dead Hamas fighters, and the study excludes the one way the Times tries

Only 12% of ground articles mention Hamas fighters killed, and the study treats this as the Times hiding Hamas’s losses. Who counts dead Hamas fighters? The Israeli army. It claimed 17,000 to 20,000 in 2024 with no method. US intelligence said 11,000 to 13,000. Haaretz’s own reporting from serving commanders said the army’s tally included “Palestinians who never held a gun in their lives”. Set against a death toll that was more than two thirds women and children, the army’s number is a press release, and a newspaper that prints it as a fact is doing propaganda.

Then the study’s Appendix A rules that “the Israeli army says it targeted Hamas militants” does not count as a mention. That is the one form in which the Times does relay the claim, in article after article. The study excludes it and then reports that the Times never mentions it.

Seven bins for Israeli suffering, three for Palestinian

Appendix A gives the Israeli side seven categories: casualties on 7 October, casualties after 7 October, suffering, personal suffering, 7 October victim suffering, 7 October victim personal story, and hostages. The Palestinian side gets three: casualties, suffering, personal suffering. There is no category for the thousands of Palestinians in Israeli detention without charge. None for settler violence in the West Bank. None for the aid blockade, none for famine, none for the Palestinian journalists killed. The study was rigged before a single article was read: seven bins for Israeli suffering, three for Palestinian, and then a finding that the Israeli bins were emptier.

What it leaves out is where the bias actually is

The study admits, on pages sixteen and seventeen, that it excludes headlines, photographs, editorials, op-eds and word choice. That is where the bias at the New York Times lives, and it has already been measured, by other people, in the other direction.

The Intercept counted 1,100 articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times over 7 October to 24 November 2023. “Slaughter” was used for Israelis 60 times and for Palestinians once. “Massacre” 125 to 2. “Horrific” 36 to 4. At the Times alone, “massacre” was 53 to 1 and “slaughter” 22 to 1. Two headlines out of 1,100 mentioned children in Gaza. Per death, Israelis were mentioned 16 times as often as Palestinians. Same arithmetic as this page, done two years earlier, same answer.

Then there is the Times’s own leaked style memo of April 2024. Restrict “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. Avoid “occupied territory”. Use “Palestine” only in very rare cases. Do not call Gaza’s refugee camps refugee camps. A written instruction from the standards desk not to describe what Israel is doing in the words that describe it. The study cites the memo in a footnote and moves on.

The study says Palestinian voices are thin because Gaza “is dangerous to report from”. It does not say who made it dangerous. Israel has barred every foreign journalist from Gaza since October 2023 and killed more journalists in 2024 than any state in any year on record. Israel decides which Palestinians the Times can reach. The study counts the result against the Times.

The yardstick is the Israeli government’s

The study’s “alternative framing”, on page three, in the author’s own words. The problem is “the existence of Hamas as a military force”. The cause is Iran, Qatar, Turkey and “the unwillingness of Israel to conduct a comprehensive ground offensive”. The remedy is “strong international backing” for Israel to destroy Hamas. That is not an alternative framing. It is the Israeli government’s press line. Page eleven then opens with Antony Blinken asking why the world is not pressuring Hamas. Every “imbalance” the study finds is the gap between what the Times printed and what the Israeli government would have wanted printed. The study measures a newspaper against Netanyahu’s talking points and calls the distance bias.

Who wrote it

Edieal Pinker is the BearingPoint Professor of Operations Research at the Yale School of Management, Deputy Dean for Strategy from 2016 to 2025. His field is operations research: workforce scheduling, healthcare queues, counter-terrorism modelling, and demographic projections of American Jews. He has no background in journalism or media studies. The paper is a “Note”, the short format, in a terrorism-studies journal, not a journalism one, and the journal page showed 87 views on the day we read it. Here is what he has said in public about Israel and Gaza, in his own words, with the date and the link.

The paper’s disclosure statement reads: “No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).” That is not true. A conflict of interest is when the person doing the measuring has a stake in the answer. Pinker has four.

1. He is a citizen of the state whose coverage he is grading. The paper asks whether the New York Times was fair to Israel. Its author is Israeli.
2. He served in the army whose killing the Times was reporting. The 36,731 dead in the paper’s window were killed by the IDF. Pinker enlisted in the IDF in 1989 and patrolled Gaza the year after. He is grading how a newspaper covered the army he served in.
3. He published his verdict on Gaza before he counted a single article. Six weeks into the genocide, with about 12,000 Palestinians already dead, he wrote that Gaza’s “prisoners have always had the key”. A man who has said in print that the people being killed brought it on themselves then produced a study finding that the Times was too sympathetic to them.
4. He set out to change the coverage, and said so. He told the Times of Israel he did the study because American readers “were not getting a clear understanding of how Israelis were experiencing the war”. That is not a research question. It is a complaint, and the study is the complaint with tables.

Any one of those belongs in a disclosure statement. The journal printed none of them. The funding line is muddled too: the paper says “This work was supported by Yale School of Management.”, and the Times of Israel, after interviewing him, reported: “The study was not sponsored by Yale.” One of those is wrong, and neither the author nor the journal has said which.

The people who checked his work had the same stake. The paper thanks two colleagues for feedback on the drafts. One, Edward Kaplan, sits on the board of Yale Jewish Academics and Friends, the group that took 25 Yale faculty to Israel in March 2024 “as an act of solidarity”, in partnership with the Academic Engagement Network, a body set up to oppose boycotts of Israel on American campuses. Kaplan co-wrote the Newsweek article about that trip. The other, Gal Zauberman, teaches marketing. Nobody who reports on the Middle East, nobody who studies journalism, and nobody Palestinian read a draft.

Then there is who is carrying it. The study was first posted to SSRN on 23 January 2025 and was written up within a month by the Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post. Its journal publication was announced by Israel National News, the settler-movement paper, under “Yale professor finds ‘deep and systematic’ anti-Israel bias in NYT Gaza coverage”. It is cited by a HonestReporting contributor in the Algemeiner as “the data that exposes media’s anti-Israel bias”, alongside CAMERA and the Henry Jackson Society. The author writes: “I leave drawing conclusions about those questions to the reader.” The outlets promoting it wrote the conclusion for him, and he has not corrected any of them.

The study does not even claim what its promoters say it claims

Page six: “I do not make a claim that the NYTimes is ‘biased’ in its reporting.” Page seven: “this study does not attempt to directly address the question of bias.” Page sixteen: “Is there a correct number of mentions? I cannot say.” The headlines say bias, proven, peer-reviewed. The paper says it cannot say. Both cannot be true, and the author has let the headlines stand.

The New York Times, asked by the Times of Israel, said it had covered this “with more rigor than virtually any other US news organization” and that its editors make “careful and deliberate choices about every story”. The study’s own tables show what that choice was: a killed Israeli got 25 times the coverage of a killed Palestinian.

The one line

The study counts how often the Times reminded readers of 7 October and finds it was only most of the time. Divide its own tables by the dead and the Times gave a killed Israeli 25 times the coverage of a killed Palestinian, and one hostage more coverage than a thousand Palestinian dead. That is the finding. It is the opposite of the headline.