Kuffiyehs to headlines; An analysis of Palestinian representation in the New yYork times after the October 7th attacks.

Abstract

With the intensifying Israeli military strikes in Gaza and the consequent rising civilian casualties, it is as important as ever to ensure truthful and adequate representation for everyone involved. This adequate representation can be the difference in the education of foreign citizens. With the recent developments in AI, it becomes more of a realistic future of checking this representation before it reaches the unknowing citizens and changes their ideologies. The use of AI computational methods in the monitoring of journalistic can provide an unbiased perspective through cross-comparison of the groups involved and the language that surrounds their representation. In long and violent situations as this one, third party groups connected to media outlets could have motivations or opinions that lead to mis-representation of the direct groups. The incorrect representation of these social and cultural groups can have a big negative effect on their perception by the public and other media outlets, leading to the conflicts lasting, while the conflict itself and humanitarian crises make it often difficult for journalistic outlets to deal with conscious and unconscious biases. We present various methods that can be used to explore the practices that shape media representation of social and cultural groups, and then used them to analyze how Palestinians are represented in the New York Times after the attacks on October 7th, 2023. We find a great deal of evidence that Palestinians are not only under-represented, but misrepresented as well. Furthermore, we find evidence of reporting Gaza as an entity separate from Palestinian territories through the negative PMI score when examining the co-occurrence between the words Gaza and Palestine.