Student camps for Gaza faced negative bias in The Globe and Mail, study shows

 

Protesters were frequently characterized as more ‘hateful’, ‘violent’ and ‘unsafe,’ while university administrations and police escaped similar criticisms

This spring, student encampments popped up across Canada to protest support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. By midsummer, they had been stigmatized or shut down—and media coverage helped justify it. 

A study conducted by The Breach found that The Globe and Mail provided disproportionately negative depictions of student protesters, while more often providing neutral descriptions of police forces that in several cases violently dismantled the camps.

Nearly half of the sentences used to describe protesters were negative, including regular use of terms like “violent,” “hateful,” or “hostile,” evoking an image of dangerous camps that were in fact consistently peaceful and nonviolent.

Students were also more likely to be negatively characterized than both police and university administrators, who in almost all cases resisted calls to divest their funds from weapons manufacturers or companies implicated in Israel’s violation of Palestinian human rights.

The Breach analyzed nearly two thousand sentences in more than two hundred articles that appeared in publication’s coverage of the encampments between mid-April and mid-July, with data collected by Tech For Palestine’s Media Bias Project.

The Globe and Mail avoided the over-the-top attacks on student protesters that were seen in right-wing Postmedia publications, such as headlines in the Toronto Sun and the National Post claiming “Palestinian university encampments a threat to humanity’s values” and “Anti-Israel chaos on campus a threat to Canada.”

But the coverage in Canada’s elite paper of record demonstrated a more subtle yet still clearly distinguishable anti-Palestinian bias.

The Breach’s study builds on a series of data-driven analyses examining how Canadian media have mobilized support for government, corporate and elite interests that have long backed belligerent Israeli state policies toward the Palestinians.  (more...)

Student camps for Gaza faced negative bias in The Globe and Mail, study shows

Dramatic scenes from the University of Calgary as the Police dismantle the anti-Israel encampment on day 1. pic.twitter.com/iYkjNcXTmT

— Eye on Palestine (@EyeonPalestine) May 10, 2024