Beyond neutrality? Australian media coverage of the Israel–Gaza war

Abstract

This study examines how major Australian media outlets have constructed narratives of the Israeli–Gaza conflict, shaping how the public evaluates violence. Based on content analysis of 5,183 articles from five leading Australian news sources (ABC, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Daily Telegraph), this article compares media reporting over two periods: 7 Oct 2021–6 Oct 2023 and 7 October 2023–6 October 2024. The findings demonstrate a paradigmatic shift from a diplomatic–political frame to a crisis–conflict frame, characterised by selective attention, emotive language, and asymmetrical representation of actors and victims. The authors theorise that these dynamics function as a process of conflict priming—a process of constructing evaluative standards that can guide judgements of violence, culpability, and policy. The findings extend debates on war journalism, mediated witnessing, and moral hierarchies by showing how national media reporting can stabilise asymmetric imaginaries and influence domestic public opinion and politics.

Introduction

News not only reports on war, it also helps constitute how war is understood. News coverage shapes the frameworks through which the public evaluates violence, assigns responsibility, and supports or opposes policy (Wolfsfeld, 2018). In democratic societies, these interpretive processes are especially consequential, as public opinion directly informs foreign policy choices and resource allocation. Building on scholarship in communication and political psychology, this article introduces the concept of conflict priming to describe how sustained news coverage establishes evaluative templates for judging actors, actions, and victims in violent conflicts.

Studies from the US and the UK have consistently shown asymmetrical coverage of the Israel–Palestine conflict: strong condemnatory terms such as ‘slaughter’ or ‘massacre’ are disproportionately reserved for Israeli casualties, while Palestinian deaths are more often described in statistical or passive terms (Johnson and Ali, 2024; Philo and Berry, 2019). Content analyses also demonstrate disproportionate visibility of Israeli actors and concerns, while Palestinian suffering is frequently downplayed or perpetrator agency obscured (Hanif, 2024; Rad, 2025). This results in ‘agency asymmetry’, which refers to the patterned attribution of intentionality, rationality, and moral responsibility to some actors, while others are represented primarily through collective labels or abstracted outcomes. This asymmetry operates as a framing mechanism that shapes perceptions of legitimacy and culpability within conflict narratives. These findings suggest that media systems in the US and UK routinely privilege Israeli perspectives, thereby shaping public understandings of legitimacy, culpability, and victimhood.

In this regard, the Australian media landscape remains under-examined. This omission is significant given Australia’s position as a middle power with alliances and independent diplomatic traditions, and the size and political significance of both the Middle Eastern Muslim and Jewish communities. According to the 2021 Australian Census, Muslims constitute approximately 3.2 per cent of the national population (ABS, 2022), with concentrations in several marginal metropolitan electorates, while the Jewish population—though numerically smaller at under 1 per cent —represents a long-established community, and socio-economic and political visibility.

Understanding how the media constructs the Israel–Gaza conflict, therefore, not only fills a regional research gap but also provides insights into how national media outside the conflict zone contribute to asymmetric imaginaries with tangible domestic and diplomatic consequences.

To analyse this phenomenon, this study examines how media coverage, through ‘selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration’ (Tankard et al., 1991), establishes the cognitive benchmarks for evaluation, creating interpretive frameworks that become ‘more readily perceivable, acceptable, and memorable than other interpretations’ (Entman, 1991: 7). This study, therefore, focuses on how shifts in coverage are discursively enacted through language choice, moral evaluation, and the asymmetrical attribution of agency and suffering. The implications of such priming are profound. As the literature demonstrates, biased media reporting can distort public risk perception (Entman and Rojecki, 2001), enabling damaging stereotypes and ‘othering’ of certain populations (Said, 1981), and entrenching official, conflict-supporting narratives that act as key barriers to peaceful resolution (Bar-Tal, 2022). Analysing these mechanisms is therefore essential for understanding the foundations of public discourse and the nation’s geopolitical engagement with the conflict.

By the time this article was submitted on 14 December 2025, a mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney resulted in the shooting of 15 people and the wounding of 40 others. This was Australia’s deadliest mass shooting since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. The incident was declared by the Australian authorities as a terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State (IS) ideology. This prompted intense national debate about antisemitism, public safety, and political responsibility. While these events fall outside the dataset analysed here and are not examined empirically, the public controversy that followed illustrates how pre-existing media frames can shape which forms of interpretation—and which boundaries of legitimate critique—become salient in moments of crisis. This development reinforces the article’s argument about priming effects and the constraining of public discourse in conflict reporting.

This research provides the first comprehensive analysis of media reporting on the Israel–Gaza conflict in the Australian context, using the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023 as a critical case study. This study examines this early phase of the conflict as a bounded temporal window in which media framing and priming mechanisms are initially consolidated, with implications for how the boundaries of legitimate public discourse are shaped. Through a content analysis of 5,183 articles from the five largest Australian media outlets (The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph, The Age (newspapers), and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) (the national government-owned TV broadcaster)), this study addresses three interconnected questions:

• How do Australian media outlets construct evaluative hierarchies for actors (e.g., who is the aggressor and who is the victim) in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict?

• How did these construction processes shift following the critical juncture of the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023?

• What mechanisms of conflict priming emerge from this coverage, and what are their implications for democratic deliberation?

This research makes three contributions to scholarship on media, war, and conflict. First, we theorise these patterns as conflict priming in Australian media coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Second, its temporal methodology reveals how potential priming mechanisms seem to adapt over time. Third, it demonstrates how a national media system participates in global circuits of war representation, with significant implications for democratic engagement with international conflicts. Ultimately, the research reveals how even relatively peripheral media systems contribute to the legitimation of particular conflict narratives, shaping both public opinion, domestic politics, and diplomatic possibilities.

Literature review

War journalism scholarship has consistently documented the media’s active role in constructing conflict meanings rather than passively transmitting information (Cottle, 2006; Robinson, 2002). When media coverage systematically privileges certain actors, frames violence asymmetrically, or constrains the parameters of debate, it can undermine the informed citizenship essential to democratic accountability (Entman, 2004).

In conflict and war situations, the public relies on mass media as a primary source of information (McLaren et al., 2017). However, news coverage is a social construction, and distortion can occur between the first-hand experience of an event and its subsequent portrayal in the news (Jungblut, 2020). Media, therefore, has the power to shape public awareness, individual attitudes, and the terms of public discourse (Roskos-Ewoldsen et al., 2009), which in turn can influence electoral outcomes, policy support, and resource allocation decisions (Baum and Potter, 2008). Three widely studied mechanisms capture these influences: agenda-setting, framing, and priming (Scheufele, 2000).

These three media effects operate through related but distinct processes and interact with audience predispositions and schemas guiding message processing (Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007). Agenda-setting concerns the frequency and prominence of coverage, with increased attention elevating the perceived salience of issues and actors (Moy et al., 2016; Scheufele, 2000). As Cohen (1963: 13) observed, the mass media are ‘stunningly successful in telling [people] what to think about’. Framing organises content to support particular interpretations of events, ultimately shaping perceptions and behaviours (Moy et al., 2016; Tankard et al., 1991). Priming not only establishes what is important in the public’s mind but can also lead to support for particular courses of action (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987; Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007). While framing and priming processes increasingly unfold across hybrid media systems shaped by digital platforms and social media, this study focuses on national news media as institutional actors with enduring agenda-setting capacity, particularly during crises. In fragmented information environments, legacy media can function as stabilising—or amplifying—forces that consolidate dominant frames rather than merely reflecting digital discourse (Langer and Gruber, 2021).

In practice, agenda-setting, framing, and priming operate through different but complementary mechanisms: agenda-setting highlights what is salient; framing organises how issues are understood; and priming shapes which considerations people later apply in their judgement. This study advances the concept of conflict priming to describe how media coverage of war goes beyond framing to establish durable evaluative standards, such as who is depicted as aggressor or victim, and which forms of violence are normalised or condemned. We argue that conflict priming thus provides a framework for understanding how repeated patterns of war reporting stabilise interpretive hierarchies that persist across time and events.

Recent studies illustrate these dynamics. The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring (Council for Media Monitoring [CfMM], 2024) analysed 176,627 television clips from more than 13 broadcasters and 25,515 articles from 28 UK online outlets in 2023, finding that language frequently downplayed Palestinian casualties relative to Israeli casualties. Rad (2025) argues that major Western outlets reproduced Israeli government claims, omitted explicit attribution for airstrikes in Gaza and Lebanon, employed passive constructions to describe attacks, and expressed scepticism regarding Palestinian casualty figures, while subtly dehumanising Palestinians through word choice. Johnson and Ali (2024) report that major US newspapers reserved strong condemnatory adjectives (e.g., ‘slaughter’, ‘massacre’, ‘horrific’) primarily for killings of Israeli civilians. Conversely, Palestinian deaths, including those of children, were often reported using passive voice (e.g., ‘left to die’), obscuring perpetrator agency and, at times, implying parental negligence.

Reviews of Israel–Palestine coverage also reveal asymmetries in agenda-setting. Johnson and Ali (2024) show that ‘Israeli/Israel’ received far more mentions than ‘Palestinian’, despite Palestinian deaths far outpacing Israeli deaths in the same period. Across more than 1,100 articles published between 7 October and 2 November 2023, Palestinian child victims were only mentioned twice, even though Israeli military operations reportedly resulted in approximately 6,000 child fatalities in Gaza. Data visualisations by Mona Chalabi (2024) likewise indicate that, early in the conflict, major US newspapers devoted disproportionate attention to Israeli casualties, with a four times higher fatality rate per article for Israelis than Palestinians.

The focus of this article is on priming, which refers to how exposure to a stimulus can influence subsequent perceptions and responses, often outside conscious awareness (Kassin et al., 2019). Repeated exposure to specific words or images increases their familiarity and accessibility, making related information more readily recognisable and relevant (Goldstein, 2007; Kassin et al., 2019). The more accessible an issue or concept is in memory, the greater its influence on how people interpret new information and evaluate events (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987; Molden, 2014).

Media priming denotes ‘the effects of the content of the media on people’s later behaviour or judgements related to the content that was processed’ (Roskos-Ewoldsen et al., 2009: 75). Conflict priming, a domain-specific form of media priming, captures how exposure to conflict-related stimuli—in headlines, articles, and images—conditions later evaluations of targets (groups, actors, events). It produces interpretive frameworks that become ‘more readily perceivable, acceptable, and memorable than other interpretations’ (Entman, 1991: 7). For geographically distant conflicts, these mechanisms are especially consequential because domestic audiences depend on mediated accounts to understand events and evaluate policy options (Philo and Berry, 2019), often without explicit awareness of the priming processes shaping interpretation.

Conflict news influences the formation of public opinion and political decision-making, with the capacity to fuel escalation, motivate military intervention, or support non-violent conflict management (Robinson, 2002; Tenenboim-Weinblatt et al., 2016; Wolfsfeld, 1997). Moreover, actor-specific bias—when violence by some actors is more frequently or more vividly reported than violence by others—can shape public knowledge and government policy (Zhukov and Baum, 2016). For instance, biased reporting can produce misguided expectations about how a conflict will unfold and about the necessity or form of external intervention (Zhukov and Baum, 2016).

Priming through media discourse also affects risk perception (Entman, 2004). When the news disproportionately emphasises specific threats—such as terrorism—it can distort the perception of magnitude and likelihood, with measurable effects on public concern and policy preferences (White, 2022).

Conflict priming can also result in stereotyping and labelling (Roskos-Ewoldsen and Roskos-Ewoldsen, 2007; Said, 1981). Research on terrorism coverage shows that repeated associations between Islam and terrorism can damage intergroup relations between non-Muslims and Muslims (Bowe et al., 2013; Chuang and Roemer, 2013) and promote anti-Muslim attitudes (Nellis and Savage, 2012; Saleem et al., 2016; Von Sikorski et al., 2017).

Othering and alienation are further possible consequences of media priming in conflict contexts (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). As Bicer et al. (2022) note, Muslims and Islam are often depicted either as a security threat (terrorism, migration) or a cultural threat, reinforcing images of the Muslim world as conflict-ridden and underdeveloped (see also Poole, 2002).

Such ethnocentric coverage aligns with patriotic support for one’s own government policies (Fahmy, 2007) and belligerence towards perceived enemies (Wolfsfeld et al., 2008). It also helps justify in-group actions while delegitimising, or even criminalising and dehumanising, out-group actions (Fishman and Marvin, 2003; Rivenburgh, 2000). Finally, conflict priming can reinforce official, conflict-supporting narratives, which impede peaceful resolution (Bar-Tal, 2022). When such narratives become hegemonic, they can reshape social structures and identities, and infiltrate institutions, influencing preferences for conflict resolution.

The gap in understanding how Australian media frame the conflict and prime domestic audiences to evaluate it is important given Australia’s geopolitical position, its large Jewish and Middle Eastern communities, and its role in international diplomacy. The 7 October 2023 attacks and the subsequent military escalation thus provide a critical case for examining how, in the Australian context, priming mechanisms adapt under conditions of intensified conflict.

Method

This study employs a multi-layered analytical approach to examine the framing of the Gaza–Israel war in Australian media coverage. Following Entman’s (1991) conceptualisation of media framing, we analyse how journalistic techniques shape public perception through narrative construction and language choice. In the context of international affairs reporting, conflict priming—where initial media frames influence subsequent interpretation of events—merits particular attention.

Data collection and sampling

We employed a systematic sampling approach across Australia’s major media outlets. The sample was drawn from the Factiva database, encompassing articles from five prominent Australian media organisations: The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, and the ABC. These outlets were selected based on their significant circulation figures, diverse ownership structures, substantial coverage of international affairs, and their status as authoritative and professional references in Australia.

The study established two distinct sampling periods to enable temporal comparison: a pre-conflict baseline period (7 October 2021 to 6 October 2023) and a post-attack period covering the first full year of the intensified conflict (7 October 2023 to 6 October 2024). This precise one-year timeframe was intentionally selected to facilitate a focused analysis of the evolution of media discourse from the initial attack through to its first anniversary.

Selection criteria and data processing

The sampling framework employed both inclusion and exclusion criteria to ensure analytical rigour. Articles were included if they primarily focused on Australian reporting of the Gaza–Israel conflict. Conversely, we excluded publications that primarily addressed the conflict from non-Australian perspectives or focused on tangential issues. To systematically identify relevant articles, we developed a comprehensive keyword search protocol, incorporating terms such as ‘humanitarian crisis’, ‘Gaza–Palestinian conflict’, ‘Hamas’, ‘Gaza blockade’, ‘ceasefire’, ‘human rights violations’, ‘hostages’, and ‘peace negotiations’ (see Table 1 for the complete list). This automated filtering process ensured systematic identification of relevant materials while excluding articles that did not substantively engage with the core research focus. The sample contained 5,183 news articles.

Table 1.

Keywords used in automated keyword search of records to exclude irrelevant documents.

	And/Or
Gaza–Israel conflict
exp Gaza Strip/ exp Palestinian territory/ or exp Palestinian authority Hamas or Gaza blockade, or occupation or West Bank, or Jerusalem or Intifada and/or Refugees Crisis and/or Rafah (Hamas or “Gaza Strip” or “Palestinian territory”) (“Rafah offensive” or “siege of Gaza” or “ground operations”) (“Gaza–Israel conflict” or “Israel–Gaza war”) or “Gaza Strip” or “Palestinian territory” or “Palestinian authority” or “Gaza blockade” or occupation or “West Bank” or Jerusalem or Intifada or “refugee crisis” or Rafah or “Israel war”	(Israel war or Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) or Netanyahu or Army Military and/or Ground operations and/or Hostages release) (IDF or “Israeli Defence Forces” or Netanyahu)	Human Rights Violations and/ or International Law and/or Ceasefire; and/or UN resolutions and/or Peace negotiations international agencies or exp international cooperation and/or Two state resolution (“humanitarian crisis” or “human rights violations”) same (Gaza or Palestine or Israel) (“international law” or “UN resolutions” or ceasefire or “peace negotiations”) and (Gaza or Israel or Palestine) “ground operations” or “hostage release” or “human rights violations” or “international law” or ceasefire or “UN resolutions” or “peace negotiations” or “two-state solution”

Analytical framework

We first conducted a systematic analysis of recurring descriptor themes related to the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, using the content analysis software NVivo 12. A theme, as defined by Braun and Clarke (2006: 82), ‘captures something important about the data in relation to the research question, and represents some level of patterned response or meaning within the data set’. In this study, themes were coded specifically in relation to metaphorical language and framing devices employed in reporting on the Gaza–Israel war. In examining the frequency, context, and deployment of these linguistic patterns, we sought to understand the potential implications of current media coverage for Australia–Arab relations and public discourse.

The coding process, centred on metaphorical language and framing devices, adhered to Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-phase approach to thematic analysis (familiarisation with the data, generation of initial codes, search for themes, review of themes, definition and naming of themes, and production of the analysis). Using the sentence as the unit of analysis, we conducted both deductive and inductive coding to capture explicit and latent themes.

To enhance analytical rigour, we supplemented our thematic analysis with computational linguistic analysis using NVivo, generating frequency-based word clouds, which were subsequently refined to focus on recurring descriptor themes. We then traced high-frequency adjectives to their contextual usage within phrases, allowing for nuanced analysis of their semantic deployment.

The most frequently occurring phrases and adjectives used to describe the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and Israel–Gaza situation are presented in Table A1.

Second, we focused on headline analysis, recognising the crucial role of headlines in shaping public discourse. Headlines not only summarise content but actively shape readers’ understanding and evaluation of complex situations (Steuter and Wills, 2009). Given that many readers primarily consume news through headlines rather than full articles (Mousoulidou et al., 2024), headlines represent a critical site for examining how media frames influence public perception of international conflicts. Therefore, our analysis paid specific attention to headline construction, word choice, and framing devices used in the coverage of the Gaza–Israel conflict.

Integrating these analytical approaches helped us examine both macro-level patterns and micro-level linguistic choices in Australian media coverage of the conflict, providing insights into how media discourse constructs and reinforces understandings of the Gaza–Israel war.

Findings

The evidence indicates a marked discursive transformation in Australian media coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict following the attacks on October 7, 2023. This paradigmatic shift from a diplomatic–political paradigm—characterised by institutional framing, policy-focused discourse, and analytical detachment—to a crisis-conflict paradigm—marked by security-centric framing, emotive language, and asymmetrical actor representation.

The empirical evidence demonstrates three critical dimensions of this transformation: (1) thematic restructuring from diplomatic processes to security imperatives; (2) linguistic intensification from institutional neutrality to moral polarisation; and (3) asymmetrical representational practices that construct hierarchies of agency, legitimacy, and victimhood. These patterns manifested within 48 hours of the October 7 attacks. They exhibited remarkable temporal stability throughout the subsequent 12-month period, demonstrating conflict priming’s capacity for rapid implementation and sustained influence on mediated discourse.

The pre-October 7 diplomatic–political paradigm

Prior to October 7, 2023, Australian media discourse operated within a coherent diplomatic–political framework that systematically constructed the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as an object of institutional management rather than immediate human concern. Thematic analysis reveals the structural characteristics of this paradigm:

Government Policy and Response themes dominated the coverage (67.8% of articles), anchoring discourse in Australian foreign policy processes rather than conflict dynamics. Peace Process discussions constituted a secondary thematic emphasis (45.3% of articles), characterised by abstract references to diplomatic initiatives and territorial recognition debates. Conflict Agents Representation received minimal attention (12.3% of articles), with Hamas functionally absent from discourse and Palestinian actors rarely appearing as autonomous political subjects. Humanitarian and Environmental Issues remained peripheral (8.4% of articles), with Gaza conditions framed in terms of environmental degradation rather than systematic deprivation.

This thematic distribution reflects an institutional distancing—a discursive strategy that mediates distant conflicts through bureaucratic processes, thereby containing their affective and moral dimensions within manageable policy frameworks.

The pre-October 7 period exhibited consistent deployment of a formal, institutional register that reinforced analytical detachment from the conflict’s human consequences. Lexical analysis reveals dominant patterns: (1) Policy-Oriented Terminology, focusing on ‘foreign policy decision’ (n = 247), ‘diplomatic positioning’ (n = 156), and ‘strategic consideration’ (n = 134), constituted the primary descriptive vocabulary; (2) Institutional Neutrality Markers, including ‘controversial proposal’ (n = 89), ‘symbolic gesture’ (n = 67), ‘bureaucratic process’ (n = 45), dominated the evaluative language; and (3) Abstract setting, highlighting ‘peace process’ (n = 178), ‘two-state solution’ (n = 145), and ‘territorial recognition’ (n = 123), characterised the substantive discourse.

Critical commentary within straight news reporting typically took the form of policy-oriented critique and maintained an institutional register, even when challenging government positions. Such critiques relied on technocratic rather than moral evaluation, characterising decisions as “a blow to peace and our credibility” or dismissing them as “unhinged virtue-signalling”—formulations that preserved analytical distance while avoiding direct ethical engagement. This linguistic architecture fostered what we term evaluative deferral: the systematic postponement of moral judgement in favour of procedural analysis.

Headline construction and actor representation

Headline patterns mirrored this orientation. Headlines such as ‘Israel eyes closer security ties here’ (The Age, December 2021) positioned Israel primarily as a diplomatic partner and strategic ally. This discursive construction normalised Israeli state legitimacy while systematically distancing Israeli actions from conflict-related violence, creating what we theorise as ‘diplomatic immunity’ through association with Australian strategic interests. In contrast, Palestinian actors consistently appeared as objects of policy deliberation rather than autonomous political agents. Headlines exemplifying this pattern included ‘Is Australia about to recognise a state of Palestine too?’ (The Sydney Morning Herald, October 2022), where Palestinian statehood is subject to Australian foreign policy choice rather than Palestinian political agency or self-determination. Most significantly, Australian political figures dominated conflict-related coverage as the primary decision-makers. Headlines such as ‘No change on Jerusalem: Wong’ (The Australian, 16 October 2022) foregrounded domestic politicians as authoritative actors, while reducing the international conflict to an Australian foreign policy consideration. This pattern demonstrates what we conceptualise as ‘jurisdictional appropriation’—the discursive transformation of distant conflicts into domestic political debates, thereby domesticating international events within familiar institutional frameworks (See Table A2).

The post-October 7 crisis-conflict: Security imperatives and moral polarisation

The October 7 attacks precipitated an immediate and comprehensive thematic restructuring across all major outlets. A comparative analysis documents the exponential increases in previously peripheral themes. Security/Terrorism theme appeared in 78.9 percent of articles, up from 18.7 percent in the pre-october 7 period, establishing security imperatives as the dominant interpretive framework. Conflict Agents Representation appeared in67.4 percent of articles up from 12.3 percent, with Hamas receiving systematic organisational designation and terrorist classification, though outlets such as the ABC differed in terminological approaches. Humanitarian Issues increased from 8.4 to 45.2 percent of articles, although framed within crisis rather than systematic deprivation narratives. Community Relations expanded from 15.6 to 52.3 percent of articles, reflecting conflict domestication through local community impact. Reporting also expanded to include regional actors (e.g., US support, Iran, Hezbollah), while Australia’s stance was portrayed as a diplomatic recalibration amid crisis conditions.

Linguistic shift

The post-October 7 linguistic landscape replaced institutional neutrality with affective charge and moral evaluation. A vocabulary analysis reveals a statistically significant transformation. Terms like ‘terror’, ‘massacre’, ‘brutal’, and ‘evil’ became the dominant descriptive vocabulary. Palestinian actors were systematically portrayed through dehumanising language—with ‘savage’ appearing 567 times, and ‘murderers’ 445 times. Meanwhile, Israeli civilians’ experiences were described in more personal terms, emphasising ‘agonising wait’ (234 instances), ‘survival trauma’ (178 instances), and detailed family narratives. Israeli military operations were described through totalising military terminology—‘all-out siege’ (156 instances), ‘scorched earth operation’ (89 instances)—while humanitarian consequences in Gaza were described through catastrophe metaphors and devastation imagery. This linguistic transformation created a systematic evaluative asymmetry—a differential moral loading that constructs hierarchies of legitimate action and deserving victimhood through the deployment of a systematic vocabulary (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Frequency-based word cloud of Australian news coverage.

Headline analysis: Personification and domestic integration

Headlines increasingly foregrounded political and military leaders—‘Netanyahu’s Race against Time’ (Financial Review, January 2024), ‘Grave risk from Iran’s proxy war’ (The Age, October 2023)—transforming abstract institutional processes into individual agency narratives. The coverage systematically incorporated domestic Australian actors into conflict narratives: religious communities (‘Jewish teachers urged to ditch unions’, The Australian, January 2024), political figures (‘Minns fires up at MPs on Gaza’, Daily Telegraph, February 2024), and cultural institutions (‘STC should act or losses will grow: Jewish patrons’, Financial Review, February 2024). This domestication process demonstrates what we theorise as ‘glocalized conflict framing’—the systematic embedding of international conflicts within domestic social relations, transforming distant events into immediate local concerns with direct community implications and political consequences (See Table A2).

Asymmetrical representation: The discursive construction of agency and victimhood

Analysis reveals systematic asymmetries in actor and victim representation that intensified following October 7. These patterns, based on constructed hierarchies of moral worth, political legitimacy, and deserving victimhood, align with broader scholarship on conflict representation. The attribution of political agency followed consistent asymmetrical patterns that shaped audience understanding of responsibility and legitimacy. First, Hamas was systematically constructed as a coherent organisational actor with direct, intentional agency. Hamas, referenced in 67.4 percent of post-October 7 articles, was consistently attributed immediate responsibility through active voice constructions: ‘Hamas launched’, ‘terrorists executed’, ‘militants targeted’. This hyper-visibility created what we term ‘organisational transparency’, emphasising intentional political action and direct accountability. Second, Israeli actions were predominantly mediated through institutional abstraction—‘the Israeli military’ (n = 1,247), ‘the Israeli government’ (n = 892), ‘defence forces’ (n = 645). Passive voice constructions dominated, for example, ‘operations were conducted’, ‘measures were implemented’, ‘responses were authorised’. This institutional mediation created what we conceptualise as ‘bureaucratic opacity’—systematic diffusion of responsibility through organisational hierarchy, which reduces individual accountability.

This differential attribution of accountability constructs an agency asymmetry, in which Palestinian actors appear as transparent political subjects while Israeli actions are naturalised within institutional frameworks, systematically shaping audience perceptions of intentionality, responsibility, and appropriate response.

This asymmetry extended to the moral and emotional framing of violence and victimhood. The terrorism frame—applied to Palestinian actors—amplified security discourse, foreclosed political contextualisation, and reinforced a binary of aggression versus defence. Israeli civilians were portrayed with high granularity and affective resonance, particularly in hostage narratives rendered through personalised testimonial accounts. Conversely, Palestinian casualties were reported statistically or framed within abstract humanitarian tropes, diminishing their narrative visibility and affective impact. These discursive asymmetries coincided with a marked temporal consolidation of security-oriented framing following 7 October, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Temporal evolution of the framing paradigm in Australian news coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Moral evaluation terminology was systematically applied to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate political action. Analysis reveals near-exclusive application of terrorism terminology to Palestinian actors. ‘Terror/terrorism/terrorists’ appeared in excess of 1,000 times in reference to Palestinian actions versus 12 times for Israeli actions—a differential that demonstrates systematic rather than circumstantial application. This selective deployment amplified the security discourse while foreclosing political contextualisation and creating binary distinctions between legitimate defence and illegitimate aggression. Israeli military actions received legitimising frames—‘response’ (n = 802), ‘retaliation’ (n = 634), and ‘defence’ (n = 567), while Palestinian actions received delegitimising frames—‘attack’ (n = 1,234), ‘aggression’ (n = 445), and ‘violence’ (n = 789). This systematic differential creates what we term ‘legitimacy boundaries’—discursive limits that define acceptable political action and appropriate state responses. The combined effect of selectively applying a terrorism frame and defensive–aggressive binary construction establishes a hierarchical evaluation wherein Israeli actions appear reactive and justified. In contrast, Palestinian actions appear initiatory and illegitimate, regardless of temporal sequence or political context. These pattern reflect a substantial increase in the volume of actor representation overall, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3.

Word frequency comparison of key conflict actor groups in Australian media coverage before and after October 7 2023.

Furthermore, the analysis revealed profound asymmetries in victim representation, possibly impacting empathy and moral consideration—Israeli victims received 4.7 per 1,000 words, Palestinian victims 1.2 per 1,000 words. Descriptions of victims, including their family details, amounted to 61.7 percent for Israeli victims and 18.3 percent for Palestinian victims. Personal testimonies from Israelis totalled 847 instances, and 156 instances for Palestinians. Similarly, Israeli victims received 2.1 emotional descriptors per mention, Palestinian victims 0.6 per mention.

Israeli victims were systematically individualised through names, ages, family relationships, personal histories, and extensive testimonial accounts that emphasised psychological trauma and recovery narratives. Palestinian victims were predominantly reported through statistical aggregation— ‘casualties’, ‘deaths’, ‘humanitarian toll’—which obscured individual identity and personal experience.

Together, these elements reinforce an empathy gap in representation, calibrating public perception towards a hierarchised valuation of human life and suffering. This narrative architecture, in effect, stabilised unequal conflict imaginaries. The discursive rendering of Israel as a legitimate diplomatic and defensive actor—and of Palestinians as securitised threats—functioned as a powerful legitimising force, naturalising asymmetry in both action and victimhood.

Table A1 summarises the thematic shifts that underpin these discursive transformations. Each central theme and subtheme illustrates how the narrative moved from political abstraction to emotive immediacy. For instance, codes related to Australian Government Policy maintained presence post-October 7 but were subsumed under crisis frames. Similarly, the emergence of Community Relations and the centrality of antisemitism discourse after the attack illustrate the domestication and moral polarisation of the conflict. These thematic shifts are reflected in lexical choices and headline constructions, completing the paradigmatic transition identified through empirical analysis.

Discussion: Conflict priming through media framing

This study offers an empirically grounded account of how dramatic geopolitical events interact with media routines to reconfigure public discourse. Consistent with priming and framing theories (Entman, 1993; Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007), the October 7 attacks transformed the conflict’s representation in Australian media from a bureaucratic, diplomatic abstraction into an emotionally charged, security-centric narrative. This paradigmatic shift demonstrates the media’s role not merely as a transmitter of information but as an active participant in shaping the interpretive framework and emotional response based on public sentiment.

Prior to the attack, the conflict fell within what we term a diplomatic–political paradigm that prioritised institutional responses, foreign policy considerations, and abstract political processes. This aligns with what Wolfsfeld (2004) describes as privileged, elite-driven media narratives in foreign conflict coverage, where political actors dominate and the human cost is minimised. In this phase, the Australian public was primed to interpret the conflict through a lens of policy deliberation, in which ethical or emotional dimensions were secondary.

During the post-attack period, a crisis–conflict paradigm emerged, in which the dramatic nature of the violence served as a ‘priming event’ (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987), recalibrating public heuristics through intensified accessibility and salience. As Price and Tewksbury (1997) argue, such priming effects influence not only what people think about but also how they think about it. Security and terrorism became the dominant interpretive lenses, crowding out frames grounded in historical context, political grievance, or international law. Critically, this re-framing was not ideologically neutral. Drawing on Entman’s (2004) framing theory, the discursive privilege of some actors and frames over others reflects intentional processes of selection and salience. Israeli civilian experiences were repeatedly personalised, while Palestinian casualties were rendered in aggregated and statistical terms. This disparity reflects what Chouliaraki (2006) and Slovic (2007) describe as the ‘inequality of suffering’ and the ‘identifiable victim effect’: whereby individuated victims elicit stronger affective engagement than anonymised groups, with direct implications for public sentiment and policy legitimisation (Pantti et al., 2012).

Further, the recurrent use of ideologically loaded lexical clusters—‘massacre’, ‘evil’, ‘savage’, ‘murderer’, ‘fighter’, and ‘terrorist’—to describe Palestinian actors contributes to Van Dijk’s (2000) ‘ideological square’, which positively valorises in-group actors while systematically devaluing the out-group. Within the Australian corpus, Israeli conduct was framed through institutional language (‘the military’, ‘the government’), whereas Palestinian agency, and Hamas’s agency in particular, was personified and criminalised, contributing to a binary of rational defender versus irrational aggressor. While these discursive patterns were evident across all five outlets, their intensity was not uniform. Commercial tabloids—most notably The Daily Telegraph—tended to rely more heavily on emotive and moralising language, whereas ABC coverage generally adopted a more restrained register consistent with its public broadcasting mandate, though this restraint did not necessarily result in evaluative symmetry.

The study also demonstrates the domestication of international conflict, where local cultural, political, and religious actors were increasingly invoked within the conflict narrative. As Cammaerts (2009) observes, global conflicts are frequently refracted through national identity frameworks, generating moral panic and reinforcing in-group allegiances. The conflation of criticism of Israeli state actions with antisemitism reflects a broader trend in Western media, wherein structural critique is recoded as moral deviance, thus narrowing the boundaries of acceptable discourse.

In the Australian context, this domestication was particularly evident in the surging concern about antisemitism discourses, which served as a proxy for moral alignment within the conflict frame. Criticism of Israeli policy was taken as antisemitism, demonstrating how framing can systematically constrain the range of acceptable public discourse. For Australia’s national public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), these dynamics intersect with institutional expectations of impartiality. Public controversies surrounding ABC’s Gaza coverage—including the dismissal of journalist Antoinette Lattouf and her subsequent successful unfair dismissal claim—illustrate the heightened reputational and political pressures faced by public broadcasters when reporting on highly polarised conflict. We note this as contextual background rather than as a finding of the present analysis. More broadly, while this analysis focuses on an early, bounded phase of the conflict following the 7 October attacks, subsequent developments—including the protracted destruction of Gaza, heightened international protest, and evolving diplomatic and domestic political responses—underscore the continuing relevance of understanding how media framing and priming were initially consolidated (Reuters, 2025; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA], 2024).

The process of conflict priming documented in this study is not politically neutral. As observed in other contexts, media portrayal of foreign nations tends to reflect the government policy of the time. The shift to a security/terrorism frame and the asymmetrical humanisation documented in this study produced a media discourse aligned with the traditional geopolitical posture of Australia and its Western allies. While not necessarily a conscious strategy, the findings illustrate how journalistic routines and framing choices can ‘manufacture consent’, a concept closely related to conflict priming. By framing critical perspectives on Israeli military strategy as inherently problematic or antisemitic, the media effectively constrained the spectrum of acceptable public debate.

Taken together, these findings illustrate conflict priming: a hybrid media effect that combines the accessibility and applicability dimensions of priming with the normative force of framing. Once established, these interpretive schemas exhibit strong resistance to disruption, creating durable public attitudes and narrowing the range of acceptable discourse. This has significant implications for democratic deliberation, particularly when criticism of military strategy is framed as unpatriotic or antisemitic, as seen in Australia.

The analysis shows that the media do not simply reflect reality but also play a critical role in constructing the meaning of conflict through selective framing, discursive asymmetries, and affective cues. The identification of a shift from a diplomatic–political to a crisis–conflict paradigm underscores the need to treat media not as passive intermediaries but as active agents in the construction of public consent (Herman and Chomsky, 2012) and moral hierarchies (Chouliaraki, 2006).

The study provides a framework for identifying how media framing can escalate conflict perceptions, influence legitimacy perceptions through agency asymmetry, obscure historical complexities, and foreclose democratic deliberation. Future research should further examine the interplay between media ownership, political alliances, and narrative construction, as well as the effects of audience feedback loops in shaping editorial priorities. Comparative research suggests that media framing of the Israel–Palestine conflict can shift over time. For example, British mainstream media have faced sustained criticism for asymmetrical portrayals of Israeli and Palestinian casualties as the conflict progressed (Sabido, 2022), raising important questions about whether similar temporal shifts occurred in Australian coverage during later stages of the war. In doing so, it becomes possible to challenge dominant discourses and promote more equitable, historically grounded, and empathetic reporting of protracted international conflicts. Finally, while this study examines an early post-attack phase to capture the initial consolidation of frames, future research could disaggregate coverage into multiple temporal phases to assess how framing dynamics evolve as conflicts protract.