The Architecture Of Obsession: How Media Coverage Warps Israel's RealityADAM ELIYAHU BERKOWITZ/ISRAEL 365 NEWS
When Samuel Hyde set out to explain why Israel dominates global media coverage, he knew the debate would begin where it always does--with arguments over words. Critics and defenders alike fixate on whether journalists write "settlement" or "neighborhood," whether the barrier is labeled a "security fence" or "apartheid wall."
These semantic battles feel forensic, as if the correct noun might finally settle the great drama of the Middle East. But Hyde, a South African-Israeli writer and fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, identifies these disputes as exactly what they are: a distraction. Words matter, he writes, but they keep us arguing on the surface while deeper, more corrupting structures remain untouched and unseen.
In a Jerusalem Post editorial and on his Substack, Hyde exposes two distortions so massive they become strangely invisible. The first is the sheer scale of attention--not criticism, but attention--directed at Israel. The second is the systematic reduction of regional warfare into a localized Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Together, these forces explain why Israel occupies such an outsized and morally charged place in Western media's imagination, and why that coverage has become both obsessive and fundamentally dishonest.
How does disproportionate media coverage transform Israel from a country into a symbol--and what reality gets erased in that transformation?
Hyde begins with numbers that expose an obsession defying rational explanation. In the first nine months following October 7, 2023, The New York Times published 6,656 articles about the Gaza war. Compare that to 80 articles covering the American-led battle to free Mosul, Iraq, over nine months in 2016-2017. The Tigray War in Ethiopia killed 600,000 people in a year and warranted 198 articles. Syria's civil war generated 5,434 articles during its first 13 years combined. One AI analysis found that between 50,000 and 70,000 articles about Gaza appeared worldwide in nine months, compared to 1,000 about Mosul in the same timeframe.
The imbalance becomes even more grotesque when examined at individual news organizations.
Former Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman revealed that AP employed more full-time journalists covering Israel than it assigned to China, India, and Russia combined. Israel received more dedicated staff than all of sub-Saharan Africa--an entire continent encompassing dozens of countries, hundreds of millions of people, multiple wars, famines, mass displacement, and genocidal violence. As Hyde writes, "You cannot plausibly cover Israel more than an entire continent without warping the reader's sense of reality."
This is not journalism as rational analysis. Even if news were merely meant to cover suffering, power, and danger on Earth, this allocation of resources would be indefensible. The pattern reveals something else entirely: a systemic fascination bordering on obsession with covering Israel as though it were the gravitational center of world affairs.
Hyde identifies the consequence of this saturation: "This saturation coverage creates the illusion of centrality." Audiences learn that whatever they see most frequently must be the most important event in the world. Israel transforms from one nation among many into "a kind of moral index of the age--a stage upon which the world's conscience is imagined to be tested and revealed." Meanwhile, catastrophes of far greater scale and brutality flicker briefly across screens before disappearing into silence.
The second distortion operates at the conceptual level. Media coverage routinely frames Israel's wars as "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," as though the entire story were a localized struggle between two neighboring peoples--one strong and one weak, one powerful and one victimized. Hyde calls this framing "tidy, emotionally resonant, and yet profoundly misleading."
The reality is stark: "Most of Israel's wars have not been fought against Palestinians but against Egyptians and Jordanians, Syrians and Lebanese, Iraqis and, increasingly, Iranians." Israel's most significant enemy today is the Islamic regime in Iran--a non-Arab, non-Palestinian regional power pursuing nuclear and strategic ambitions. During the recent war, rockets fired at Israel came from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran itself.