Analysis finds disproportionately high media attention to Israel — Jerusalem Post
In Israel, the Jerusalem Post reported on an analysis by independent researcher and technology entrepreneur Jeremy Musigi. He analyzed nearly 14.7 million news items published from 2017 through August 2026 and concluded that the country has received a disproportionately large and sustained volume of international coverage.
Musigi used the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), which monitors media in 65 languages, as well as GDELT's television database. He examined how often countries were mentioned or were the main subject of international publications, excluding each country's domestic press from the sample.
Sustained attention after peak events
According to the analysis, international attention to most major crises usually rises sharply after an event and then quickly declines. As examples, Musigi cited the Taliban's capture of Kabul in August 2021, the start of the war in Sudan in April 2023, and the mass departure of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh in September of that year.
At the same time, coverage of Israel, according to the author's calculations, remained elevated. During the year after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel's share of the examined airtime on U.S. cable news averaged 5.65%. One year after the attacks, this figure was 27 times higher than the pre-war level, according to the analysis.
In print media, the share of articles about Israel reached 3.8% in 2024 and remained at 3.6% through August 2026.
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Comparison by volume and tone
The researcher chose 2019 as the baseline period, when the intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was lower. That year, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israeli forces killed 135 Palestinians, while Palestinians killed ten Israelis. The analysis showed that Israel was the main subject of one in every 112 international news items and ranked seventh globally by total volume of coverage.
In 2024, according to Musigi's calculations, Israel was mentioned in one out of every 26 items worldwide, while the number of publications about it was more than twice the combined number of articles about the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
The analysis also recorded a negative tone in Western media publications about Israel: in 2024, the average score was -4.4 on a scale from -10 to 10, and 78% of items had a negative score. At the same time, GDELT measures the balance of positive and negative wording in a text rather than determining bias in coverage.
Musigi links the identified pattern to a decades-long anti-Israel influence campaign. In his view, it was initially promoted by the Soviet Union and later supported by other state actors, international institutions, and activist networks.
