Colonial Media: Why Does Western Journalism Oppose the Palestinians?

In an era where people seek knowledge and understanding, Western media continues to cover global events with a distorted, dualistic logic that lacks even the most basic elements of justice. Despite its long history of news production and its professed commitment to objectivity, its reporting on conflicts—such as the war on Gaza—remains trapped in a colonial lens that perpetuates the narratives of dominant powers while ignoring the suffering of occupied peoples and rationalizing crimes of colonialism. It reproduces injustice by framing aggression as legitimate self-defense, and the struggle for liberation as terrorism. In Gaza, this bias became clear through adopting the Israeli narrative, dehumanizing Palestinians, and disregarding the broader historical and contextual realities of the Palestinian cause.

Ever since the launch of the brutal war of extermination on Gaza, one can find thousands of examples reflecting blatant bias in Western media. A simple illustration comes from The New York Times, whose headline read: “War and Disease May Kill 85,000 Palestinians in Gaza Over Six Months.” Chillingly, the editors omitted any mention that disease outbreaks, water shortages, and mounting deaths are a direct consequence of Israel’s war machine pounding Gaza by land, air, and sea, combined with a suffocating blockade that has continued for months, if not years. It is as if the editors aim to blame Gaza for its own misfortune, whitewashing and exonerating the occupying power by failing to mention it in the headline.

This omission is just one blatant example of how events are reported in a way that blinds people to the truth, portraying Palestinians as victims of random misfortune or natural disasters. It is as if rain, which falls as natural water in other parts of the world, becomes American-made bombs in Gaza, as though the skies over Gaza were an exception—raining destruction instead of water.

In this report, we explain how “colonial” Western journalism works to conceal the crimes of Israel’s occupation army, even as it carries out genocide against the Palestinian people.

Dehumanizing Palestinians

Despite the genocide being broadcast live on social media, most Western media outlets have tried to sanitize the conflict, burying their heads in the sand or using other tactics to avoid confronting the atrocities committed by Israel. They systematically dehumanize Palestinians. After the first week of the war, statistics showed that Palestinian casualties were already higher than those on the Israeli side. Yet, Palestinian coverage in Western media remained sparse.

A study conducted by the investigative journalism platform Acrimed revealed that major French newspapers—Le Parisien, Le Figaro, Libération, and Le Monde—provided significantly fewer front-page stories about the massacre in Gaza compared to October 7. The same trend applied to morning interviews on the radio station France Inter.

Meanwhile, a quantitative analysis by The Intercept reviewed over a thousand articles from six major U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, and concluded that, at least during the first few weeks of the war, coverage was tilted in favor of “Israel.”

Even more alarming is how Palestinian victims are rendered “less newsworthy.” Data scientists Dana Najar and Jan Litava analyzed a total of 600 articles and 4,000 live posts on BBC’s website from October 7 to December 2. Their findings, published by journalist Mona Chalabi (an English journalist of Iraqi origin writing for The Guardian), showed that BBC reports often used vague terms like “people” or omitted the subject entirely when referring to Palestinian deaths—e.g., “150 died today in Gaza from Israeli military operations.” In contrast, descriptions of Israeli casualties included personal or familial details, such as “mother,” “grandmother,” “friend,” “brother,” “son,” or “granddaughter.”

This disparity in coverage deliberately strips Palestinians of their humanity by depicting them merely as “people” without clear familial or social ties. Such reporting makes it difficult for audiences to form an emotional connection or sense of empathy, as though these lost human lives emerged from nowhere and returned there.

BBC Middle East Director’s Work with the Israeli Mossad

This bias is unsurprising. According to one BBC journalist writing in the American magazine Jacobin, BBC editors fear being reprimanded by their superiors for producing reports displeasing to the Israeli government. This fear has repeatedly driven the broadcaster to avoid fully reporting the horrors of Israel’s war on Gaza.

In the latest demonstration of BBC’s pro-Israel alignment, MintPress published a detailed exposé by British journalist Owen Jones. It uncovers how Raffi Berg, the head of the BBC’s Middle East division, steers coverage to serve Israeli narratives, downplaying or ignoring violations against Palestinians.

The report explains how Berg wields sweeping control over editorial decisions—headlines, text, and even image selection—to conform with Israeli perspectives. The piece stresses Berg’s significant power to reject or reframe content, frequently excluding Palestinian viewpoints. This is no exaggeration. In November 2024, over 100 BBC employees accused their employer of favorable treatment toward Israel in its coverage of the occupation’s war on Gaza.

Jones traced Berg’s background, revealing that Berg studied “Jewish and Israeli Studies” at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and participated in a pro-Israel demonstration in London at the height of Israel’s 2009 aggression on Gaza. The report further uncovered Berg’s collaboration with the Israeli Mossad and the CIA while writing his book Red Sea Spies, which praises the Mossad as “the world’s greatest intelligence service.”

Berg himself admitted, in a filmed interview, to spending over 100 hours with Mossad official Dani Limor in preparation for the book. Behind Berg, the interview video features framed photos of him with prominent Mossad and Israeli government figures—including Limor and Mark Regev, the former spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office. It also reveals a letter of thanks from Yair Netanyahu, son of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, expressing gratitude for Berg’s support.

The BBC is not alone in facing accusations of blatant bias in its coverage of the war on Gaza. In his book, October 7: Fact-Finding and Lies of the Day that Changed the World, Belgian journalist Michel Collon and co-author Jean-Pierre Bouchy offer a meticulous critique of how European (especially French-language) media handled this pivotal day in the Palestinian struggle. The authors highlight how Western media has disgracefully covered Israel’s genocide in Gaza—ongoing for over a year and recently expanding to Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

After examining hundreds of archival materials, Collon and Bouchy expose how Western media outlets willingly promote a pro-Israel narrative that portrays Palestinians as aggressors, while granting Israel the right to defend itself under the guise of a “civilization vs. barbarism” war. This is in line with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rhetoric—despite his international notoriety for war crimes.

They explain that before October 7, the plight of Palestinians was nearly absent from European TV news. Yet 2023 was already the deadliest year for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, where almost 200 people—among them 43 children and 1 woman—were killed, mostly by Israeli security forces, and at least 8 by settlers. More than 2,000 Palestinians had been detained and incarcerated in the West Bank, all before October 7.

Following that date, Western platforms effectively became mouthpieces to justify atrocities. For instance, writer Céline Pina claimed that “emotion cannot equate victims,” and in March 2024, while thousands of Palestinian women and children were being massacred, legal philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy remarked, “I have rarely seen an army so concerned with avoiding civilian casualties in a horrific war,” in an attempt to polish Israel’s image despite clear evidence of genocide.

Root Causes of This Bias and Lack of Professionalism

A Colonial Ideology

Journalist Fadia Krishnan describes this skewed press as “colonizers’ journalism,” produced by journalists from colonial countries who take pride in their imperial conquests and hold a heightened sense of self-importance. Every fiber of this journalism is imbued with centuries of predatory accumulation of wealth, knowledge, and privilege.

Krishnan argues that these journalists view their nations as defenders of civilization, having historically vanquished powerful and immoral enemies to save the present. This is the prevailing narrative in the West—and hence in Western media.

Her assessment is echoed by Professor Daya Thussu of Hong Kong Baptist University, who spent three decades teaching journalism and communication at Goldsmiths, University of London, focusing on Western hegemony and media bias. He calls this “structural bias,” rooted in a colonial mindset that underpins what he terms the “agenda-setting media.”

Major Western outlets such as Britain’s Reuters, France’s Agence France-Presse, America’s Associated Press, the BBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post derive their global influence from a lengthy legacy of news production and local coverage. As they also hail from nations that founded the current global order, these outlets naturally serve as role models for both media professionals and audiences worldwide.

Functioning as giant news factories, these institutions define global coverage. According to an in-depth report by 7iber, most media outlets rely on subscriptions to their breaking-news feeds, as well as the accompanying visual or audio materials. Modern journalism emerged in the West following the invention of the telegraph in the mid-19th century, facilitating the birth of international wire services like Reuters—based in London, then capital of the British colonial empire.

With Britain’s expanding global influence, Reuters grew in tandem, shaping its editorial policies to meet imperial needs. Thussu details this in a 2022 research paper published in the Oxford Journal of Journalism Studies.

The satellite era in the 1990s further intensified Western dominance. By 2020, more than 300 orbiting satellites were primarily owned by Western mega-corporations like Intelsat or U.S. defense giants Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Hughes—together controlling 70% of fixed-communication satellites. Simultaneously, with the expansion of undersea cables, American firms like Verizon and SubCom consolidated control over much of this global infrastructure.

In the digital age, U.S. tech giants such as Google, Facebook (Meta), and Amazon own or lease half of undersea bandwidth—the data capacity that provides the world’s internet connections. This led to what some scholars label “platform imperialism,” a term coined by researcher Dal Yong Jin in a 2013 academic paper.

The world saw firsthand how Western social media platforms—particularly Meta’s Facebook—bolstered biased media coverage by silencing pro-Palestinian voices and human rights defenders on Instagram and Facebook. A report by Human Rights Watch documented this wave of censoring Palestinian-related content.

Thussu underscores that coverage of Gaza is a glaring example of structural bias, stating: “These institutions have a long history of representing their countries’ foreign policy interests—long before Gaza; from Vietnam and Latin America to Iraq and Afghanistan. Just look at how they portray China, Russia, or India today.”

This pattern of bias is common to many Western media outlets, including the BBC, which is institutionally bound to Western hegemony. The BBC’s proximity to British power structures makes it particularly vulnerable to political agendas tied to pro-Zionist interests, as reported by a BBC editor. This closeness distorts editorial policies, reinforcing a structural bias in international reporting—especially on Palestine.

Financial Pressure on the Media

Although some Western journalists protest the overt partisanship of their outlets toward Israeli occupation, coverage of the war remains largely unchanged. In Europe, for instance, one can glean the reasons by noting that nearly every one of the top 40 companies listed on the Paris Stock Exchange invests heavily in Israel. Three of them belong to billionaires who also dominate much of the French media, as described in Michel Collon’s book:

1. 1. Bolloré Group (owner of “CNews,” “Europe 1,” “Paris Match”) acquired the Israeli ad agency “Inbar Merhav G” and Blink—Israel’s largest social platform—through its subsidiary Havas. Yannick Bolloré, CEO of Havas (the world’s sixth-largest communications group), stated: “Israel is a world leader in innovation and entrepreneurship.”

1. 1. Dassault Group (owner of Le Figaro) has provided Israel with fighter jets—even in defiance of international embargoes—and maintains offices and subsidiaries in Israel. CEO Laurent Dassault declared: “I am the Dassault who returned to Israel, from the family that invests there. I am a staunch supporter of Israel.”

1. 1. Bernard Arnault (owner of Les Echos and Le Parisien) controls L’Oréal, the largest cosmetics company in Israel, and—through Sephora—markets products from Israeli settlements on Arab lands. He also invests in the Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz.

In the United States, economist and political thinker Edward Herman argued in a 1993 paper published in the Journal of International Affairs that government influence manipulates news, particularly on foreign policy. According to Herman, U.S. authorities employ “ideological weapons” to ensure “media compliance,” which not only involves embracing the official narrative but also suppressing journalists who strive for genuine professionalism.

Such compliance is influenced by Zionist lobby groups like AIPAC, Christian Zionists, and military contractors, who wield financial leverage to impose their agendas. The cycle begins with Zionist lobbyists pressuring U.S. politicians, who in turn rely on lobby funding for their election campaigns. Lawmakers and White House officials then pass this pressure on to media outlets, shaping public opinion to match the lobby’s preferred narrative.

Additionally, media ownership is intensely concentrated—five multinational companies dominate over 1,400 daily newspapers, 6,000 magazines, 10,000 radio and TV stations, and 2,500 publishing houses, per a study by media analyst Ben Bagdikian (2014). This centralization creates editorial uniformity across hundreds of outlets, binding editorial policies to capital interests closely linked to American politics.

Despite government and corporate media’s pervasive bias toward Israel, recent polls show growing public sympathy for Palestinians in the U.S. A November survey by the Arab American Institute found that 63% of Americans support a ceasefire and 55% believe the United States should not provide unconditional financial and military aid to the Israeli occupation.