Gender hierarchies in reporting genocide: an analysis of the dehumanization of Palestinian men in Western media

Abstract

This article investigates how Western media’s coverage of the first three months of the ongoing Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, specifically the language adopted by two major Western media outlets the BBC and CNN, dehumanizes Palestinian men. This research question is answered through a quantitative methodology that applies web scraping to collect 265 articles from the BBC and 4,441 from CNN to then analyze the number of articles and occurrences of keywords plus the frequency variation of both from October 7 to December 31, 2023. The analysis uncovers a clear dehumanization of Palestinian men, mainly by ignoring or naturalizing the suffering and death of these men and by framing them as violent, hypersexual and irrational terrorists. The article concludes that the BBC and CNN adopt a coverage that conveys an anti-Palestinian media bias and dehumanizes Palestinian men while reinforcing gender hierarchies in reporting genocide.