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Abstract

Focusing on the news headlines of five international news agencies—AP, QNA, Reuters, TASS, and Xinhua—in their coverage of the first 4 months of the Israel–Gaza war, this comparative content analysis examined their use of war vs. peace journalism, alongside issue-specific conflict framing. Results revealed all agencies, except QNA, relied on war journalism more than peace journalism, where “no labels” was the most common indicator. Among the war journalism indicators, the focus on the “here and now” and “visible effects” suggests a preference for episodic battle coverage, a finding supported by the results of the issue-specific frames, where prognostic and diagnostic frames, indicative of thematic coverage, were dwarfed by a propensity to focus on military conflict and responsibility. Still, diplomacy prevailed, highlighting the multi-party orientation of this war and the tendency of the headlines to emphasize international diplomatic efforts to bring peace and reconciliation.

Keywords

Conflict war/peace journalism framing content analysis news agencies Middle East

Since October 2023, Israel and Gaza have been engaged in the deadliest war to ever occur between the two sides since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. In addition to civilian deaths, the war is also considered the deadliest conflict on record for journalists (Gorani and Sowden, 2024). Following the Palestinian militant group Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023—one that resulted in 1200 deaths and 251 hostages—Israel retaliated through aerial bombardment and ground invasions of Gaza, the stronghold of Hamas. Since then, Israel's war on Gaza has caused unprecedented human suffering, with 57,680 reported fatalities, 137,409 reported injuries, “acute malnutrition,” and “catastrophic levels” of food insecurity, in addition to putting half of Gaza's hospitals out of service and damaging 70% of all structures (UN OCHA, 2025). Several countries and aid agencies, including South Africa, Spain, and Amnesty International, have accused Israel of war crimes and genocide, with the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories reporting “reasonable grounds” to believe that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza (United Nations, 2024: 3).

Amid such harsh circumstances that limit access to war zones, journalists become a significant and sometimes the only witness to events on the ground. In this conflict, however, access to Gaza was so “rare and tightly controlled [and] military-led” that in October 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists, alongside 18 partner organizations, asked “the Biden-Harris administration to urge Israel to allow independent access to Gaza for U.S. and international journalists, in the interest of transparency, accountability, and press freedom” (Committee to Protect Journalists, 2024). Difficulties with access can be understood from the perspective of gatekeeping and indexing theories, where institutional, organizational, and professional factors dictate which information journalists select and package as news (Shoemaker et al., 2009), often aligning it with the narrow range of elite voices from the institutions they cover (Bennett, 1990). The Hierarchy of Influences model is especially applicable here, particularly in accounting for the various levels of pressure stemming from organizations, society, newsgathering norms, and individuals that influence journalistic stories (Shoemaker and Reese, 1996). Viewed in light of these difficulties, war reporting has been called a “litmus test” for journalism, one that creates problems associated with journalists’ “allegiance, responsibility,” and their commitment to “truth and balance” (Allan and Zelizer, 2004: 3). Historically, media coverage of conflict has taken a war journalism approach, focusing on the conflict between sides and on a zero-sum type of reporting that highlights the episodic nature of wars through an emphasis on the here-and-now and on the voice of elites (e.g., Dimitrova and Strömbäck, 2005; Lee and Maslog, 2005; Neumann and Fahmy, 2012). Journalists, however, have the option of presenting the war with a win–win orientation, emphasizing the voice of the people rather than the conflict of the elites, to advance a peace journalism narrative (Galtung, 1986).

Taking the Israel–Gaza war as the topic of the study, this content analysis aims to uncover differences in how five news agencies—The Associated Press, Qatar News Agency, Reuters, TASS, and Xinhua News Agency—relayed news about the war in their headlines. Our interest in these news agencies is based on their leading role as intermediary organizations that provide services to media across the globe (Rantanen and Kelly, 2021), in addition to the impact of political and media systems on how media operate (Dimitrova et al., 2005; Strömbäck and Dimitrova, 2006). This sample of international cooperative, for-profit, and state news agencies in Canada, China, Qatar, Russia, and the United States allows for a comparative analysis that can shed light on whether news agencies’ political ties with their governments shape their coverage of a war that carries great geopolitical significance for various world powers. Given the significant position Qatar played as a mediator between Israel and Hamas (Aras and Al Ansari, 2024), examining QNA promises to offer meaningful insight into the roles news agencies play in a conflict in which their governments have high stakes but are not direct combatants. This study, thus, aims to apply war and peace journalism frameworks (Galtung, 1986, 1998) and issue-specific conflict framing (Dimitrova and Strömbäck, 2005) on international and state news agencies in the first 4 months of the war. The peace journalism framework has a normative orientation that prescribes how media portrayals of military conflict could promote non-violent solutions (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005), while the pragmatic scholarship on issue-specific framing of military conflicts has been applied in comparative studies to explain how war coverage in various countries reflects differences in media and political systems. The goal is to examine how the two frameworks complement each other and what insights can be gained by each from the other.

Theoretical framework

War and peace journalism

Journalists shape reality through their choice of language and sources of information. The use of specific words and actors lends to framing political and societal issues in ways that influence how the public thinks about and understands these issues (de Vreese, 2005; Druckman, 2001). During wars, journalists tend to focus mostly on political elites, presenting wars as a zero-sum game through a conflict lens that emphasizes disagreements between sides without providing context (Galtung, 1986). To balance journalists’ tendency to exploit the news values of conflict and prominence, Galtung (1986, 1998) proposed peace journalism as a framework that focuses on citizens, the invisible effects of wars, and agreements between sides, describing it as the high road media can take thanks to its win–win orientation that rests on in-depth analysis of the causes and consequences of armed conflict. Peace journalism, thus, enables the public to “value non-violent responses to conflict” (Lynch, 2008: 3) and to consider conflict de-escalation and resolutions as possible solutions.

Although some scholars subscribe to the idea of peace journalism and see the value in adopting this approach (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2007)—based on the understanding that war journalism is not objective as widely believed to be but is rather biased toward violence journalism (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005)—others argue this type of advocacy stands in the way of the principles of objectivity and integrity that are highly valued in Western contexts (Hanitzsch, 2004; Loyn, 2003). Despite these reservations, news professionals around the world are open to this approach since it aligns with their view of themselves as advocates who give voice to the public, more so than mere tools to disseminate information (Adegbola and Zhang, 2022; Prager and Hameleers, 2021). Importantly, peace journalism seems to have become more acceptable, following the recent normative turn in journalism studies that has given way to advocacy journalism and solutions journalism. Experimental research lends support to the theory that peace journalism framing leads to audience de-escalation orientations (Thiel and Kempf, 2014) and even cooperative solutions (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2013).

From a content analysis perspective, studies of war and peace journalism in the news have yielded mixed findings. In research on news agencies, one study found Reuters favored war journalism frames during Sri Lanka's civil war, whereas AP and AFP's coverage was more balanced (Neumann and Fahmy, 2012). Different results appeared in a study of the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war, where the headlines of western (AP and Reuters) and non-western (TASS and Xinhua) news wires leaned more toward peace journalism (Nguyen, 2023). Regarding the national media's approach, studies of conflicts have revealed a propensity to use war journalism more than peace journalism. For instance, elite U.S. newspapers used war framing when covering the Pakistan–Indian conflict over Kashmir (Siraj, 2008), as did Asian newspapers in their coverage of regional conflicts in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines (Lee and Maslog, 2005). In a similar vein, Asian national newspapers focused on war journalism compared to vernacular non-metropolitan newspapers, which Lee (2010) attributes to the possible influence of Western newswires. War framing also appeared in the visuals posted on Twitter following a terrorist attack in Pakistan in 2018 (Hussain and Fahmy, 2024).

In Middle Eastern conflicts, one study found U.S. elite newspapers used conflict frames to cover Syria's use of chemical weapons in 2013, while also advancing some elements of peace journalism (Cozma and Kozman, 2015). Similar results appeared in Ersoy's (2016) study that showed Turkish media leaning toward a war journalism frame in their coverage of incidents between Turkey and Syria, in part due to the country's involvement in these incidents. In the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, specifically, a comparative study revealed the Israeli newspaper Haaretz relied on war journalism more so than The New York Times and The Guardian (Fahmy and Eakin, 2014), similar to another study of Israeli newspapers that found their tendency to use war journalism in their coverage of the 2006 Lebanon War was congruent with that of Canadian media, possibly due to Israel's involvement in the conflict and to Toronto Sun's use of news agency copy (Shinar, 2009). Lastly, war and peace journalism frames were equally prevalent in Western and Arab media's coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in 2011, with differences in demonizing language across these media (Ozohu-Suleiman, 2014).

The history of the conflict between Israel and Gaza makes the present war particularly significant from a media perspective. Faced with a war that pits two opposing ideologies, journalists’ national identity could lead them to identify with one population or one issue more than the other, ultimately influencing the language they use to report the war (Allan and Zelizer, 2004), similar to Jones and Sheets’ (2009) study that revealed how social identity explains why journalists in the United States and its allies mostly refrained from using the word “torture” to describe the treatment of prisoners in the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison story, unlike their European counterparts. Regarding the decades-long conflict between Israel and Palestine, Roy (2012) revealed how editorials in The New York Times constructed positive and negative identities of the Israeli and Palestinian people, respectively, through descriptive terminologies. Similarly, CNN's coverage of the conflict in 2021 “prioritized an Israeli perspective” through elite Israeli and U.S. leaders (Bhowmik and Fisher, 2023: 1031). In yet another study, Western media outlets BBC World and CNN showed some bias toward Israel, defending its occupation of Palestinian lands, while Al Jazeera and Press TV's bias was against Israel, calling its treatment of Palestinian prisoners “brutal” (Ozohu-Suleiman, 2014: 100). Furthermore, the analysis of British and South African media's coverage of “the Israeli assault on Gaza” in 2014 revealed journalists’ tendency to encourage “asymmetrical warfare” in the news, through the use of statistics to “legitimize Israeli attacks and de-legitimize attacks from Gaza,” relying on lexical choices that revealed the discrepancy in the use of military tactics in their reporting (Tasseron and Lawson, 2022: 238). It is noteworthy to mention that framing also occurs in what a news outlet calls the conflict. While some organizations refer to it as the Israel–Gaza war, others call it the Israel–Hamas war, Israel's war on Gaza, or Israel's invasion of Gaza.

Issue-specific war frames

Extant studies on media coverage of international news have consistently revealed conflict to be the most prominent news value, overshadowing other pertinent generic frames, such as human interest and morality (Godefroidt et al., 2016; Hamdy and Gomaa, 2012; Semetko and Valkenburg, 2000). Besides conflict, the generic frame of responsibility is especially pronounced during wars, as evidenced by studies of media coverage of wars in the Middle East, including Syria, Yemen, and the second Gulf war (e.g., Alsridi and Ziani, 2020; Cozma and Kozman, 2015, 2018; Dimitrova et al., 2005; Godefroidt et al., 2016; Greenwood and Clough Jenkins, 2015). Within the context of issue-specific war framing research, Dimitrova and Strömbäck (2005) advanced a framing typology that measured the presence of several issue-specific frames during the 2003 Iraq War: military conflict, human interest, responsibility frame, diagnostic, prognostic, violence of war, anti-war protest, and media self-referential. In their operationalization, Dimitrova and Strömbäck (2005) made a distinction between the seemingly overlapping frames by specifying military conflict to be solely related to the military, such as troops and taking hostages, whereas violence of the war refers to visible violent acts such as bombs and invasions, bearing in mind that one sentence could include multiple frames. Their analysis found a heavier focus on military conflict and prognostic frames, followed by responsibility and anti-war protests in Sweden's Dagens Nyheter, while human-interest frames were equally present in Nyheter and The New York Times. Follow-up studies on the same war revealed differences in framing between media, where Arab news websites in Egypt and Qatar relied more on the military conflict and violence of war frames, in contrast to U.S. and British media that emphasized the long-term benefits of the war as well as the success of coalition military tactics (Dimitrova and Connolly-Ahern, 2007).

News agencies

Considered to be the oldest electronic media in the world, news agencies play a central role in the media landscape, locally and globally. Their significance lies in their position as “wholesalers of news” (Jang, 2013: 195) and intermedia agenda-setters (Dell’Orto, 2016). Media's financial challenges in the past few decades have driven heavier reliance on news agencies’ copy (Johnston and Forde, 2011), making the task of news dissemination even more pronounced for large, international news agencies like the Associated Press (Dell’Orto, 2016).

With journalistic norms that reflect western standards, AP operates within the American media system, which is characterized by “freedom of the press … lack of government interference … and an independent but profit-orient” mindset (Gershberg and Carr, 2021: 177). Similarly, Reuters, which was formerly British but is now under Canadian ownership, emphasizes its objective role in providing the news without taking sides (Reuters, n.d.) and is part of the North American media landscape (Gershberg and Carr, 2021). Dominating the international news flow alongside AP is Russia's state news agency TASS that was once part of the Big Five (Rantanen and Kelly, 2021). As a “federal state-unitary enterprise,” TASS receives direct funding from the government (Vartanova and Vyrkovsky, 2020: 1849). Joining AP, Reuters, and TASS as part of the new Big Seven is China's state news agency, Xinhua (Rantanen and Kelly, 2021), considered one of “China's key central state-owned news organizations” (Xin, 2018: 1039) and the mouthpiece of China's Communist Party (Chen and Xu, 2021). Lastly, Qatar's QNA is funded by a state subsidy and is affiliated with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (State Media Monitor, 2024).

Although western agencies have presented themselves as objective and unbiased, the media and political landscapes in which an organization operates affect how journalists report on conflicts, especially during crises (Dimitrova et al., 2005; Strömbäck and Dimitrova, 2006). With the tendency to mirror the stance of political elites and index their reporting according to the width of the debates in elite circles (Bennett, 1990), U.S. media reflect the views of their government, across a variety of cases and countries (e.g., Entman and Page, 1994; Hallin, 1986). TASS, as well, brought forth Soviet voices that AP, AFP, and Reuters ignored in coverage of the 2003 Iraq War and was found to be biased toward the Russian government in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis (Watanabe, 2017).

Headlines in today's media environment

Headlines are the most salient framing devices in a story, signaling to readers what is newsworthy about an event (Pan and Kosicki, 1993). As “the most potent factor entering into the formation or direction of public opinion” (Emig, 1928: 53), headlines not only point to readers’ stories that are worthy of their attention but also influence how people interpret these stories (Geer and Kahn, 1993; Groshek and Clough Groshek, 2013). Although the public has for long considered headlines autonomous texts (Ifantidou, 2009) and surfed the news through a quick glance at headlines without reading the full story (Allport and Lepkin, 1943; Graber, 1998), the function of news headlines has shifted in today's media environment. While editors have always used headlines to create an impression (Allport and Lepkin, 1943; Ifantidou, 2023), today's headlines rely especially on linguistic (Tandoc, 2014) and emotive devices (Ifantidou, 2023) that are meant to create curiosity and lure readers into the story (Ifantidou, 2009; Kuiken et al., 2017). These functions that have become necessary in the digital media environment have prompted newsrooms to rely on lexical and semantic choices to increase web traffic through web metrics (Tandoc, 2014) and click-through rate (Kuiken et al., 2017). Taking together the above studies, one could make a point for headlines, as short as they are, to be enough to present a specific frame, especially considering linguistic and emotive words (Ifantidou, 2023; Tandoc, 2014), such as victim, aggressor, genocide, or martyr, are enough to convey a frame. A more direct example comes from Lynch and McGoldrick (2005) who illustrated the power of one phrase—“Who will win?” about the Iraq War on the cover of Newsweek—to present the war as a zero-sum game with a focus on the win–lose orientation of war journalism. Headlines could also be considered a central element of frame building, “the processes that influence the creation or changes of frames” by journalists (Scheufele, 1999: 115). Frame building is viewed as a reciprocal relationship between frame sponsors, who are authoritative elites with strong influence on frames, and journalists who can play a pro-active role during the process of frame building (Wichgers et al., 2021).

In the absence of previous comparative research on the five agencies in the current Israel–Gaza war, we propose research questions instead of hypotheses to explore how the headlines framed the war and whether the coverage varied according to geopolitical and cultural proximity to the conflict zone:

RQ1: What indicators of peace and war journalism were most prevalent in the headlines of the news agencies?

RQ2: Were there differences among the news agencies in emphasizing war vs. peace journalism?

RQ3: Were there any differences among the news agencies in their stance toward Israel and Gaza?

RQ4: Were there differences among the news agencies in how they framed the war?

Method

This comparative content analysis of five news agencies—AP, QNA, Reuters, TASS, and Xinhua—focuses on their coverage of 4 months of the 2023 Israel–Gaza war. The sampling considered the first 16 weeks, starting on the day the war broke on October 7, 2023, and ending on January 26, 2024, the day the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention” (ICJ, 2024: 1)—the first major international stance against any side.

Sampling

To retrieve the sample, we applied a systematic stratified sampling approach in the Nexis Uni and Factiva databases within the time frame for the study, using the keywords “Israel” and “Gaza.” The search yielded a total of 12,529 stories from the five agencies. We calculated the sample size based on population size, 95% confidence interval, and 2.65 margin of error. This produced 1247 articles, allowing us to sample every tenth headline in each agency in a list organized in descending order in the corresponding database. The original breakdown of 1247 headlines was as follows: AP (174), Xinhua (182), Qatar News Agency (131), TASS (230), and Reuters (530). After discarding non-headlines (such as AP “News Brief” and QNA “News Summary”) and headlines not about the Israel–Gaza war (such as “Qatar Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs meets US Secretary of State”), the final sample size was 871.

Unit of analysis

The unit of analysis is the headline, in line with recent framing research that has analyzed headlines about various topics, including conflict, gun violence, and the coronavirus pandemic (e.g., Ebrahim, 2022; Ersoy, 2016; Liu et al., 2019).

Measures

This study measured 33 variables in four sections: story descriptions (agency and date), war journalism (9 indicators), peace journalism (13 indicators), and war framing (9 frames). All main variables followed a binary measurement of absence or presence.

The operationalization of war and peace journalism (Table 1) was based on Maslog et al. (2006) and Ha et al. (2020). For war journalism, nine questions were asked, where the last one measured whether the headline advocated for Israel or Gaza (only if the eighth question about the headline being partisan was a yes). Similarly, for peace journalism, 11 variables and two follow-up questions about which of Israel or Gaza is victimized and demonized were used. Checking for scale reliability revealed low coefficients. We, therefore, removed the elites and non-elites variables to improve scale reliability, resulting in an acceptable rate for Cronbach's alpha as follows: war journalism (M = 1.59, SD = .26, α = .65) and peace journalism (M = 1.41, SD = .22, α = .67). Each scale was then created by averaging its indicators. Examples of peace journalism are: “Israel will allow a daily pause in Gaza combat, as US seeks a multiday break” (AP); “Russia rescues most Russian hostages held by Hamas, work to continue—Foreign Ministry” (TASS); and “Chinese envoy calls for Palestinian-Israeli ceasefire, protection of civilians” (Xinhua). Examples of war journalism are: “Ongoing occupation aggression on Gaza leaves dozens martyrs, wounded” (QNA) and “Israel troops kill two Palestinian teens in West Bank amid Gaza anger” (Reuters).

Table 1.
War and peace journalism indicators (RQ1).

AP Reuters TASS QNA Xinhua Total

Peace journalism % % % % % %

Win–win orientation 18.0 27.7 22.8 32.0 29.6 25.9

Invisible effects 64.8 68.9 59.5 47.6 54.1 61.2

Non-elites 37.7 27.7 34.0 36.9 42.2 34.0

Resolutions 19.7 29.4 22.8 31.1 31.9 27.0

Causes and consequences 5.7 23.6 0.5 1.0 0 9.1

No labels 92.6 96.3 94.9 54.4 98.5 90.8

Multi-party orientation 57.4 61.8 57.7 56.3 48.9 57.5

Non-partisan 51.6 64.5 75.8 40.8 80.7 65.2

Non-victimizing 64.8 78.0 90.2 67.0 88.9 79.6

Victimized—Israel 12.3 8.1 3.7 0 1.5 5.6

Victimized—Gaza 21.3 13.5 6.0 33.3 9.6 14.5

Non-demonizing 85.2 80.1 94.4 51.5 96.3 83.5

Demonized—Israel 4.9 16.2 6.5 48.5 3.7 14.1

Demonized—Gaza 8.2 4.4 0.5 0 0 2.8

Non-emotive 73.8 85.5 93.0 68.9 94.1 85.1

War journalism

Zero-sum orientation 31.1 26.0 47.9 45.6 41.5 36.9

Visible effects 32.8 31.4 62.8 51.5 59.3 46.0

Elites 68.9 81.1 96.7 91.3 85.2 85.1

Differences 27.0 34.5 1.9 3.9 0 16.4

Here and now focus 63.9 57.1 79.5 84.5 91.1 72.1

Good and bad dichotomy 47.5 34.8 36.7 60.2 24.4 38.5

Two-party orientation 38.5 31.1 41.4 42.7 41.5 37.7

Partisan 45.9 38.2 18.6 57.3 20.7 34.0

Advocate—Israel 14.8 10.8 3.3 0 0 6.5

Advocate—Gaza 30.3 27.7 15.3 57.3 20.7 27.4

Note: Bold figures denote the highest levels in the respective column.

Issue-specific war framing measured the presence of the following eight frames (Dimitrova and Connolly-Ahern, 2007; Dimitrova and Stromback, 2005): military conflict, human interest, responsibility frame, diagnostic, prognostic, violence of war, anti-war protests, and media self-referential, in addition to a diplomacy frame that we added due to its relevance to this war.

Intercoder reliability

Intercoder reliability was conducted on a sample of 10% of headlines by the two authors of the study. Following a training session, the authors did a pilot coding of a sample of headlines not included in this study. After coding the reliability sample independently, the authors discussed disagreements and resolved them before recoding variables that did not achieve a minimum of .08 on Krippendorff's alpha. The intercoder reliability alpha coefficient on the main 31 variables ranged from .794 to 1 and recorded a mean of .897 and a median of .895.

Results

The average length of headlines was 12 words, ranging from 7 to 28 words. The lowest average was in Xinhua (10.7 words) and the highest in AP (14.5), with QNA (11.6), Reuters (11.7), and TASS (12 words) in the middle.

The first research question examined the most prevalent indicators of war and peace journalism in the sample (Table 1). For peace journalism, “no labels” was the most common, followed closely by “non-emotive,” “non-demonizing,” and “non-victimizing” indicators. “No labels” was the highest indicator in all agencies, except for QNA. For war journalism, “elites” was the most prevalent of all indicators, ahead of “the here and now.” These numbers were consistent across all five agencies, except for Xinhua, where “elites” was the second most common indicator after “the here and now.”

The second research question compared differences in war and peace journalism in the sample. The analysis of variance revealed war and peace journalism differed significantly among the five agencies, Welch's F(4, 344.652) = 3.871, p < .01. As shown in Figure 1, Reuters led the agencies in war journalism (M = 1.63, SD = .29) whereas QNA recorded the lowest values and differed significantly from each of the four agencies, as the Least Significant Difference (LSD) post-hoc tests revealed. Among the rest, only Reuters and TASS were significantly different. For peace journalism, QNA was the highest among all agencies (M = 1.54, SD = .32), and Xinhua was the lowest. Post-hoc tests revealed AP and QNA differed significantly from all agencies, whereas differences among Xinhua, TASS, and Reuters were not significant.

Figure 1.
Differences in war and peace journalism across the news agencies (RQ2).

The third research question explored differences in the news agencies’ stance toward the two sides, measured through demonization and advocacy. For this test, one war journalism indicator, “whom the headline demonizes,” and one peace journalism indicator, “whom the headline advocates for” were used (Table 2). Each was preceded by a question that asked whether the headline was demonizing and whether the headline was partisan, respectively. After excluding non-applicable cases, where the answer to the preceding question was “No,” we conducted crosstabulations. Although demonizing language was rare, appearing in only 16.9% of stories in the sample, its use differed significantly among the agencies, χ²(N = 147) = 37.83, p < .001. Neither Xinhua nor QNA demonized Gaza, while QNA demonized Israel 50 times and Xinhua 5 times. TASS demonized Gaza once and Israel 14 times. Reuters, as well, was more likely to demonize Israel (48 times) compared to Gaza (13 times). AP was the only agency that demonized Gaza (10 times) more than Israel (6 times). Advocacy appeared in only 33.9% of stories in the sample. The chi-square test revealed the news agencies advocated for Gaza significantly more than Israel, χ²(N = 296) = 32.94, p < .001. Both Xinhua and QNA advocated only for Gaza, whereas TASS advocated for Gaza on 33 counts and for Israel 7 times, Reuters advocated for Gaza 82 times compared to Israel 32 times, and AP's 37 counts of advocacy were for Gaza and 18 for Israel.

Table 2.
Differences in agencies’ stance toward Israel and Gaza (RQ3).

Demonization Advocacy

Israel Gaza Total Israel Gaza Total

N % N % N N % N % N

AP 6 37.5 10 62.5 16 18 32.7 37 67.3 55

Reuters 48 78.7 13 21.3 61 32 28.1 82 71.9 114

TASS 14 93.3 1 6.7 15 7 17.5 33 82.5 40

Xinhua 5 100 0 0 5 0 0 28 100 28

QNA 50 100 0 0 50 0 0 59 100 59

Total 123 24 147 57 239 296

χ ² 37.836* 32.942*

Cramer's V .507 334

Note. Percentages provided are within each agency. df = 4.

p < .001.

The fourth and last research question examined differences in the nine issue-specific frames. Table 3 shows that the agencies’ uses of all frames, except for media, were significantly different. The most common frame in the sample was conflict (58.3%), followed closely by responsibility (50.6%), whereas media self-referential (1.5%) and anti-war protest frames (2.8%) were the least used. Among the major differences in the sample, AP (67.2%) and Reuters (47.3%) were likely to use conflict more than other frames. Whereas AP and Reuters’ reliance on conflict was highest within each news agency, TASS (76.7%), QNA (71.85%), and Xinhua (72.6%) relied most on the responsibility frame. QNA also relied on violence (48.5%) and human-interest frames in approximately half its stories, and on diplomacy (39.8%) quite a bit, whereas Xinhua featured conflict (54.8%) and violence (39.3%) heavily after responsibility (72.6%). As for TASS, conflict (67.9%) and violence (36.7%) were also heavily used. Lastly, Reuters relied heavily on diplomacy (38.5%), as well, second after conflict.

Table 3.
Differences in issue-specific frames among the news (RQ4).

N (%)

AP Reuters TASS Xinhua QNA Total χ ² Cramer's V

Conflict 82 (67.2) 140 (47.3) 146 (67.9) 74 (54.8) 66 (64.1) 508 (58.3) 28.982 .182

Human interest 64 (52.5) 85 (28.7) 58 (27.0) 44 (32.6) 49 (47.6) 300 (34.4) 35.213* .201

Responsibility 64 (52.5) 40 (13.5) 165 (76.7) 98 (72.6) 74 (71.8) 441 (50.6) 266.555* .553

Diagnostic 17 (13.9) 43 (14.5) 21 (9.8) 21 (15.6) 2 (1.9) 104 (11.9) 14.782** .13

Prognostic 27 (22.1) 38 (12.8) 33 (15.3) 31 (23.0) 18 (17.5) 147 (16.9) 9.792* .106

Violence 42 (34.4) 46 (15.5) 79 (36.7) 53 (39.3) 50 (48.5) 270 (31.0) 56.186* .254

Protest 9 (7.4) 13 (4.4) 0 (0) 2 (1.5) 0 (0) 24 (2.8) 22.511* .161

Media 2 (1.6) 7 (2.4) 0 (0) 2 (1.5) 2 (1.9) 13 (1.5) 4.949 .075

Diplomacy 34 (27.9) 114 (38.5) 46 (21.4) 36 (26.7) 41 (39.8) 271 (31.1) 37.836*** .507

p < .05, p < .01, p < .001.

Discussion and conclusion

This study examined two types of framing of a conflict that has only escalated since the period under scrutiny. Headlines from five news wholesalers differed in their coverage of the war, providing insight into how the similarities between war/peace journalism and war framing illustrate the specific ways these theoretical frameworks support and complement each other.

The fact that the war is still ongoing as of this writing is perhaps not surprising considering the study's results, which show that all agencies, except QNA, relied more on war journalism than on peace journalism. This is consistent with literature on war journalism but diverges from the coverage of the contemporaneous Russia–Ukraine war, where the headlines of AP, Reuters, TASS, and Xinhua favored peace journalism (Nguyen, 2023). Among the war journalism indicators in this study, the two most prevalent were focusing on the “here and now” and on “visible effects,” both of which suggest a preference for episodic battle coverage. This is supported by the findings on the issue-specific frames, where prognostic and diagnostic frames, indicative of thematic coverage, were dwarfed by a propensity to focus on military action or responsibility for the war. As framing theory posits, news media's organizing of reality for their audiences through headlines, as the most salient framing devices in a story, can be particularly effective in advancing certain interpretations of events. By selecting some aspects of the war reality, such as military action and who is to blame, and ignoring or downplaying other aspects, such as human suffering and anti-war protests, news agencies favored a coverage that leaned heavily on the war. Only AP provided some space to the anti-war protest angle, perhaps due to the geographic proximity to these protests that mostly occurred on American soil. Geographic and ideological proximity might also explain why QNA focused on the violence of the war frame. To emphasize the unevenness of the war and on Israel's mounting strikes, something QNA headlines continuously referred to as “genocide” while calling Palestinian victims “martyrs,” they framed the war as one between an aggressive perpetrator and innocent victims.

The war/peace journalism literature highlights bias, operationalized as advocating for a side or as using language that demonizes or victimizes a combatant party, as responsible for ultimately promoting war escalation rather than conflict resolution. The findings of this study indicate that news agencies stayed largely neutral, with occasional instances of demonization, victimization, partisanship, and advocacy. But differences in bias emerged among the five agencies, with Xinhua and QNA unilaterally demonizing Israel and the other three demonizing Hamas, arguably reflecting their national government's foreign policy. The findings were consistent for partisanship, as Xinhua and QNA only ever advocated for Gaza, while Reuters, TASS, and AP advocated more for Gaza than for Israel, but their mix of partisan headlines was more balanced. As bias could hurt their appeal to global audiences, staying mostly neutral makes sense economically. While neutrality sells, political economy seems to play a bigger role here, where close ties to “the dominant structures of economic and political power” prevent corporate media from challenging the status quo via peace journalism (Keeble, 2010: 52). Additionally, advocating and demonizing language, while perceived as good and bad, respectively, still conveys the binary tenets of war journalism. Terms such as martyrs and victims reinforce dehumanization and encourage blame, eventually harming any reconciliation efforts (personal communication, anonymous reviewer). Such polarizing language could directly affect the public, whose members could possibly support a more violent response toward Israel or Gaza, depending on who is presented as the victim in the headline.

From a framing research perspective, the importance of lexical choices cannot be overstated. The words journalists or editors choose for their headlines form a significant part of the syntactical structures that serve as “the most salient cue to activate certain semantically related concepts in readers” minds (Pan and Kosicki, 1993: 59). In his classical work on news analysis, van Dijk (1988) emphasizes the role of grammar and language in conveying meaning to sentences, with the ability to shift the blame from one side to another in one short headline. Viewed as a macrostructure, headlines subjectively summarize the news story for readers (van Dijk, 1985) who might not find the need to read the entire story, where the sequence of sentences allows for a deeper analysis of discourse, albeit with relative interpretations (van Dijk, 1988). In today's fast-paced media environment that is characterized by information overload, the power that headlines possess leaves little room for hope that readers would be inclined to follow up on the headlines with more information from the story, arguably exacerbating the impact these initial few words have on the audience. In this context, the propensity for war journalism is problematic, as studies of framing effects have consistently indicated the power of frames to influence public opinion (Borrelli and Lockerbie, 2008; Sheafer and Dvir-Gvirsman, 2010). Peace journalism, on the other hand, could “reverse the audiences’ perceptions of confrontation to a search of common aims and decisions” (Atanesyan, 2020: 536). The positive effects of peace journalism have been corroborated in experimental research that linked peace journalism framing to audience de-escalation (Thiel and Kempf, 2014) and even cooperative solutions (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2013).

The results of this study challenge how we conceptualize war and peace journalism. First, in the Israel–Gaza conflict, elites were no longer an indicator of war journalism and of pitting one side against the other but rather a staple of stories that highlighted diplomacy efforts. Second, civilians were more associated with war journalism, as they were featured in headlines that highlighted episodes of bombings and destruction and the plight of their casualties, although they were rarely ever quoted. This last finding is crucial to how we understand peace journalism, not because civilians are included, but because this type of inclusion is a departure from the directions of peace journalism. Galtung's (1998) recommendation that the media shift the focus from elites to the people was meant to be about giving voice to all parties involved, including those “overlooked, disempowered, or written off by official political discourses” (Lynch, 2009: 156) and treating civilians as actors, not just as victims. Lynch (2008) also makes a distinction between active and passive peace journalism, same as Lee et al. (2006), whose study on the Philippines prompted them to conclude that the most prevalent indicators were the ones that were aligned with objectivity norms more than journalists’ genuine interest to contribute to peace building. Adding to this body of scholarship, the present study finds that journalistic norms should be treated with nuance; official sources are not necessarily conveyors of war propaganda and can be the voice of reason and diplomatic solutions, while civilian stories that focus on the horrors of the conflict can suggest remedies such as punishment and escalation.

Despite its inclination to favor war journalism over peace, the coverage of the Gaza–Israel conflict stood out in its focus on the diplomacy frame. Overall, one-third of headlines emphasized third-party/international efforts, talks, visits, and negotiations for conflict resolution, ceasefires, or creation of safe corridors for aid. For QNA, these frames implicitly pushed an agenda of de-escalation proposed by international, especially Arab, leaders, hinting at the injustice of such a war for Gaza, while TASS’s diplomacy frame revolved primarily around Russian politicians’ role in the conflict. These nuanced differences suggest that in order to get a balanced and more complete perspective of a large story such as a war, news consumers should expand their sources of international news and not rely on just one wire service, regardless of how widely syndicated it may be, a conclusion similar to Horvit's (2006) study that highlighted the value of including diverse sources in the news wires.

The findings of this study did not fall neatly into monolithic western and non-western media system blocks. Reuters and AP, while located in neighboring countries on the North American continent, differed from each other in their framing of the war and whom they demonized, while TASS outperformed the agencies in its use of the conflict frame and elites. The exclusive focus on Russian officials and diplomats is consistent with findings from the agency's coverage of other conflicts that did not directly involve Russia, such as the Iraq War, where, according to Horvit (2006: 442), “ITAR-TASS is still being used primarily to convey Russian viewpoints.” And while we did not perform a qualitative analysis of the headlines, close readings of the texts during coding revealed Xinhua's focus on diplomatic efforts was the most “peaceful” of all, emphasizing a win–win orientation and calling for an end to the hostilities and protecting the Palestinians. As for QNA, headlines alone captured Qatar's and the wider Arab region's political stance against Israel, using terms such as “the Israeli Entity” or “Israeli Occupation” to talk about Israel and “martyrs” to describe Gazans, while at the same time leading the pack in its use of peace journalism and diplomacy framing.

Importantly, this study provided initial insights into the connection between news agency ownership—cooperative, private, or state—and the media system in which these unique organizations operate. Specifically, the bias or lack thereof the five news agencies showed in their coverage of the war was mostly related to the country's media landscape, including their relationship with the political system (Strömbäck and Dimitrova, 2006), more than their ownership structure. The value of such an analysis, albeit preliminary, reiterates Rantanen's (2021) contention that the relationship between ownership and objectivity is not always clear-cut.

One of the study's limitations is its focus on only the first 4 months of the war. Future research should track the agencies’ coverage throughout the ongoing conflagration to better unpack how war and peace journalism fluctuates during various points in time. Second, focusing on headlines does not do complete justice to the agencies that might have framed the war differently in their full stories nor does it offer a comparable analysis of framing in extant research on news stories. Still, the fact that our study revealed the presence of all indicators in these short headlines with statistical reliability achieved for war and peace journalism scales offers a strong justification for relying on headlines. Lastly, future studies could explore more directly how the war/peace journalism framing literature and the issue-specific conflict framing scholarship could be effectively integrated into one single framework to better convey how wars are covered, considering the overlap we uncovered in the current study.

	AP	Reuters	TASS	QNA	Xinhua	Total
Peace journalism	%	%	%	%	%	%
Win–win orientation	18.0	27.7	22.8	32.0	29.6	25.9
Invisible effects	64.8	68.9	59.5	47.6	54.1	61.2
Non-elites	37.7	27.7	34.0	36.9	42.2	34.0
Resolutions	19.7	29.4	22.8	31.1	31.9	27.0
Causes and consequences	5.7	23.6	0.5	1.0	0	9.1
No labels	92.6	96.3	94.9	54.4	98.5	90.8
Multi-party orientation	57.4	61.8	57.7	56.3	48.9	57.5
Non-partisan	51.6	64.5	75.8	40.8	80.7	65.2
Non-victimizing	64.8	78.0	90.2	67.0	88.9	79.6
Victimized—Israel	12.3	8.1	3.7	0	1.5	5.6
Victimized—Gaza	21.3	13.5	6.0	33.3	9.6	14.5
Non-demonizing	85.2	80.1	94.4	51.5	96.3	83.5
Demonized—Israel	4.9	16.2	6.5	48.5	3.7	14.1
Demonized—Gaza	8.2	4.4	0.5	0	0	2.8
Non-emotive	73.8	85.5	93.0	68.9	94.1	85.1
War journalism
Zero-sum orientation	31.1	26.0	47.9	45.6	41.5	36.9
Visible effects	32.8	31.4	62.8	51.5	59.3	46.0
Elites	68.9	81.1	96.7	91.3	85.2	85.1
Differences	27.0	34.5	1.9	3.9	0	16.4
Here and now focus	63.9	57.1	79.5	84.5	91.1	72.1
Good and bad dichotomy	47.5	34.8	36.7	60.2	24.4	38.5
Two-party orientation	38.5	31.1	41.4	42.7	41.5	37.7
Partisan	45.9	38.2	18.6	57.3	20.7	34.0
Advocate—Israel	14.8	10.8	3.3	0	0	6.5
Advocate—Gaza	30.3	27.7	15.3	57.3	20.7	27.4

	Demonization	Advocacy
AP	6	37.5	10	62.5	16	18	32.7	37	67.3	55
Reuters	48	78.7	13	21.3	61	32	28.1	82	71.9	114
TASS	14	93.3	1	6.7	15	7	17.5	33	82.5	40
Xinhua	5	100	0	0	5	0	0	28	100	28
QNA	50	100	0	0	50	0	0	59	100	59
Total	123		24		147	57		239		296
χ ²	37.836***	32.942***
Cramer's V	.507	334

	N (%)
Conflict	82 (67.2)	140 (47.3)	146 (67.9)	74 (54.8)	66 (64.1)	508 (58.3)	28.982***	.182
Human interest	64 (52.5)	85 (28.7)	58 (27.0)	44 (32.6)	49 (47.6)	300 (34.4)	35.213***	.201
Responsibility	64 (52.5)	40 (13.5)	165 (76.7)	98 (72.6)	74 (71.8)	441 (50.6)	266.555***	.553
Diagnostic	17 (13.9)	43 (14.5)	21 (9.8)	21 (15.6)	2 (1.9)	104 (11.9)	14.782**	.13
Prognostic	27 (22.1)	38 (12.8)	33 (15.3)	31 (23.0)	18 (17.5)	147 (16.9)	9.792*	.106
Violence	42 (34.4)	46 (15.5)	79 (36.7)	53 (39.3)	50 (48.5)	270 (31.0)	56.186***	.254
Protest	9 (7.4)	13 (4.4)	0 (0)	2 (1.5)	0 (0)	24 (2.8)	22.511***	.161
Media	2 (1.6)	7 (2.4)	0 (0)	2 (1.5)	2 (1.9)	13 (1.5)	4.949	.075
Diplomacy	34 (27.9)	114 (38.5)	46 (21.4)	36 (26.7)	41 (39.8)	271 (31.1)	37.836***	.507

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Claudia Kozman

Raluca Cozma

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Open Access Funding is provided by the Qatar National Library.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability

The dataset is available upon request.

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	Demonization					Advocacy
	Israel		Gaza		Total	Israel		Gaza		Total
	N	%	N	%	N	N	%	N	%	N
AP	6	37.5	10	62.5	16	18	32.7	37	67.3	55
Reuters	48	78.7	13	21.3	61	32	28.1	82	71.9	114
TASS	14	93.3	1	6.7	15	7	17.5	33	82.5	40
Xinhua	5	100	0	0	5	0	0	28	100	28
QNA	50	100	0	0	50	0	0	59	100	59
Total	123		24		147	57		239		296
χ ²	37.836***					32.942***
Cramer's V	.507					334

War and peace journalism in the 2023 Israel–Gaza war: A comparative analysis of the headlines of five international news agencies

Abstract

Keywords

Theoretical framework

War and peace journalism

Issue-specific war frames

News agencies

Headlines in today's media environment

Method

Sampling

Unit of analysis

Measures

Intercoder reliability

Results

Discussion and conclusion

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Funding

Declaration of conflicting interests

Data availability

References