How the fog of war puts journalism in the frame

Since the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, and during Israel’s now three-year-long retaliation against Gaza, journalism’s traditional commitment to objectivity has been on trial.

Reporting on the Israel–Gaza war has been characterised, on social media as much as in the conservative media, as biased one way or the other.

Headlines have been parsed and corrected by social media warriors while a war of words between new journalism players and traditional media has been loud and often angry. This clash has emphasised the tension between the objective reporting claimed to be practiced by legacy media and advocacy-oriented reporting that internet journalists believe delivers more truth.

In contrast, the Russian military attack on Ukraine has been reported with milder popular criticism. The privileging of one side’s narrative over the other in this conflict appears not to have attracted the same claims of media bias.

Numerous studies have shown trust declines when audiences perceive journalism to be advocating for one position over another. In addition, they have a marked preference for news that incorporates a range of views.

This led the Centre for Media Transition to examine the way Australian media have framed both international conflicts.

We sought to understand if particular narratives have been privileged over others and if so, how. It is a normal part of the reporting process for journalists to decide what information to include, omit, emphasise, and contextualise in order to report a story. This framing process allows journalists to make some narratives more dominant and decide what sources are used to support them.

On top of framing there is journalistic voice. Despite the best efforts of a reporter to achieve objectivity, this can often be evaluative or subjective.

We examined the framing choices made by The Australian, the ABC, 9News.com.au, and The Guardian across the two conflicts when the events being reported were significant in the news cycle.

We gauged how each dealt with the dominant narratives emerging from the main parties to the conflicts.

We also looked at which voices were given more space, whose stories were personalised or depersonalised, and which contemporary and historical contexts were prioritised or deprioritised.

Our results show the media outlets across the 2023–2026 events we looked at, shifted their framing between Israeli and Palestinian narratives, depending on events on the ground.

Despite the movement in framing, Israeli frames emerged as dominant overall in 49% of surveyed articles against 32% with Palestinian narratives.

All the surveyed media outlets engaged closely with Israeli narratives following the October 7 2023 Hamas assault. But as the Palestinian death toll increased and events in Gaza raised alarm bells, the ABC, 9News.com.au, and The Guardian amplified the humanitarian consequences to the Palestinians (Palestinian frames comprised 38%, 27%, and 54% of their respective samples), although the volume of the coverage was smaller.

These outlets continued reporting Israeli security concerns as counterclaims while centring Palestinian victimhood until the conflict escalated to involve the US, Iran, Lebanon, and the Gulf states.

Only The Australian continued to privilege Israeli perspectives across all surveyed events. The masthead emphasised Israel’s narratives of victimhood, security, and self-defence (71% of the total outlet’s sample adopted Israeli frames as dominant). It also marginalised Palestinian narratives (3% of The Australian’s overall sample used Palestinian frames), including the history of this long and frequently brutal conflict.

The Australian was also the only outlet to align pro-Palestinian advocacy in Australia with narratives of antisemitism and social division. It criticised the Greens for the party’s vociferous support for the Palestinians. It also aligned the most radical of pro-Palestinian voices with more moderate ones, particularly around the time of Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood in the UN.

In coverage of the Russia–Ukraine war between 2022–2026, our results show a very different use of journalistic framing.

We found an asymmetry in engagement with and treatment of the narratives emerging from both sides. Western and Ukrainian narratives were continuously dominant across 67% of the sampled coverage by all four outlets surveyed, and the voices given prominence were overwhelmingly Western and Ukrainian.

Russian narratives received almost no interpretive authority. In fact, in the articles we surveyed, 0% engaged with Russian frames as dominant. Indeed, when Russian frames were referenced to understand what Russia still calls a “special military operation” rather than war, it was mostly to disparage them.

As a result, historical and geopolitical complexity of post-Soviet foreign policy was significantly downplayed. This includes Russian arguments that NATO’s eastward expansion in Europe was threatening, and Russia did not view NATO as a defence alliance.

One strong strain of reporting was that Russian president Vladimir Putin was an irrational actor, and his war on Ukraine indicated a psychological malaise. Another was that Russia was paradoxically threatening yet internally fragile, economically weak yet able to survive global sanctions, unable to conquer Ukraine yet able to wage war against Europe.

In this conflict, to a far greater extent than in Israel–Gaza reporting, evaluative journalistic voice was apparent. This portrayed the war through a historical lens of Soviet and Russian expansionism, while references to the controversial Minsk Agreements were largely left unexplored.

While source privileging and selective framing are the hallmark of advocacy journalism, this does not necessarily mean a piece of reporting is advocacy.

Sometimes, there is broad consensus in support of one side and in opposition to the other – as there is in relation to Russia’s war on Ukraine. In contrast, there are polarised responses around Israel–Gaza, where violations of international humanitarian law against Palestinians and Israel during the Hamas attack were documented.

But the journalistic obligation to analyse and engage viewpoints with which journalists may not agree or accept does not simply disappear in the practice of objective journalism.

The obligation can disappear in the practice of advocacy journalism such that one side’s interpretation becomes embedded as a default perspective. But the question then becomes whether this is actually journalism.
In 2022, Professor Attard was formally
banned from entering Russia for what the Kremlin labelled a
“Russophobia agenda”.
Alena Radina is a Russian citizen.

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How the fog of war puts journalism in the frame

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