The New York Times agenda-setting in 2014 Gaza war coverage

Abstract

The Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the most prominent ongoing international conflicts spanning more than two centuries with multitude of problems and dozens of international actors directly affecting the process. One of these actors is the US media, which have major significance in the production and reproduction of images and perspectives of both policy makers and the general public about the conflict. All the information gained by key participants of the conflict are obtained through media and their coverage, which are marred with controversies, inaccuracies, and accusation of biases for Israel and unfair blame-assignment toward the Palestinians. With this, the research question of this thesis would be, what is the New York Times agenda-setting on the 2014 Gaza War coverage? Several researches have pointed out how Palestine became the 'aggressor' and Israel became 'defender' in the coverage of the Times. Nevertheless, most of the attempts to pinpoint the media's agenda on their Israel-Palestine coverage are based on an analysis of regular, hard news reporting and are done so quantitatively. Using agenda-setting theory, this thesis will approach this problem with editorial pieces by the New York Times' throughout the 2014 Gaza War in a descriptive, qualitative method to offer a new angle and perspectives that can be gained on the problem of the United States' media agenda-setting in this conflict. Confirming the previous researches, it is shown that the agenda-setting pertained in regular reports has prevalence in the Times' editorial content, where they can express their stance on the issue. The Times approach in their editorial pieces could be described as heavily criticising Hamas while giving benefit of the doubt toward Israel, while strongly identifying and agreeing with the United States policy in the area. This undoubtedly will have implications toward the audience of the Times which, aligned with agenda-setting theory, will pick up these approaches in their understanding of the 2014 Gaza War.