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An analysis of nearly 14.7 million news articles published across 65 languages found that Israel received more international media coverage per capita than any country with at least 5 million residents in nine of the ten annual periods examined, with the disparity appearing even during periods without a major Israeli war.
Researcher and writer Jeremy Musighi highlighted the findings in a September 16 thread based on his recently published analysis, “Center of Attention”. The project examined international online news from 2017 through August 2026, television coverage and a more limited set of social-media indicators.
Musighi sampled 14,679,657 articles from the GDELT Global Knowledge Graph, using both its English-language and machine-translated international feeds. Domestic outlets were excluded when measuring coverage of their own countries. An article was classified as primarily about a country when that country received the largest number of geographic references in the story, according to the analysis’s methodology.
For its main per-capita rankings, the analysis excluded countries with populations below 5 million to prevent small states from disproportionately dominating the results. Musighi states that lowering the threshold to 1 million residents does not change Israel’s ranking.
The results place Israel well outside the normal range for a country of roughly 10 million people.
Across the period examined, Israel ranked first in international coverage per capita in every annual sample except 2022, when it ranked fourth behind Ukraine, Switzerland and Ireland following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Averaged across the decade, Israel still received 2.4 times as much coverage per capita as Sweden, the second-ranked country, according to the analysis. In absolute volume, Israel ranked sixth worldwide, behind only the United States, China, Britain, Russia and France.
The Disparity Existed Before October 7
The difference cannot be explained solely by the war that followed Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack.
In 2019, a comparatively quiet year in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one out of every 112 international articles in Musighi’s sample was primarily about Israel. Israel ranked seventh worldwide in absolute coverage that year and first per capita, according to the dataset.
Scaled against GDELT’s total monitored output, the analysis estimates that roughly 1.5 million international articles were primarily about Israel in 2019, approximately one article for every seven Israeli residents. The comparable figure was one article per 47 Canadians, 340 Brazilians and 1,550 Indians, according to the analysis’s methodology.
Coverage expanded substantially after October 7.
During 2024, approximately one in every 50 international articles sampled was primarily about Israel, while one in 26 mentioned the country. Israel ranked second worldwide in absolute coverage, behind only the United States, and received more than three times as many stories per capita as second-place Sweden.
The sampled volume of stories primarily about Israel also exceeded, separately, the totals for all 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, all 22 members of the Arab League and the countries of South Asia, according to the analysis.
Other Wars Quickly Disappeared from Television
Musighi also analyzed GDELT closed-caption data from CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, as well as BBC News separately, to estimate the share of monitored television airtime in which different countries were mentioned.
Following October 7, references to Israel accounted for more than 1 percent of U.S. cable-news airtime on 344 of the following 365 days. Israel averaged 5.65 percent of total cable airtime during that year, according to the analysis’s television data.
The pattern differed sharply for several other conflicts.
After Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, Afghanistan initially occupied nearly 27 percent of cable-news airtime, but coverage had fallen to about 2 percent of its peak within 90 days. Sudan’s civil war peaked at about 1.5 percent, primarily during the evacuation of American citizens, and exceeded 1 percent of daily airtime on only eight days during the subsequent 18 months.
The Tigray war in Ethiopia never reached 0.03 percent of monitored U.S. cable airtime on any day in the analysis.
Print coverage showed a similar persistence. Using the broader measure of articles mentioning a country, Israel ranked first per capita in 30 of the 34 rolling monthly periods after October 7 and second in the remaining four. By comparison, Ukraine ranked first during seven of the first 36 monthly periods following Russia’s 2022 invasion.
Western Coverage Became More Negative
The analysis also examined GDELT’s automated tone scores, which measure the prevalence of positive and negative language across an article rather than the accuracy, fairness or substantive position of the reporting.
Among Western outlets, Israel-related articles in 2019 recorded an average tone score of negative 2.2, with 49 percent falling below Musighi’s negative-2 threshold for negative coverage.
By 2024, the average had fallen to negative 4.42, with 78 percent of Western articles falling below that threshold. That was more negative than the same outlets’ coverage of Russia, Iran and Syria that year, although Yemen received a still lower score, according to the analysis’s tone data.
The geographical source of Israel coverage also shifted after October 7.
According to Musighi’s calculations, approximately 69 percent of stories primarily about Israel in 2019 originated from outlets in Muslim-majority countries, including roughly 58 percent from outlets in the Palestinian territories. Western outlets accounted for about 24 percent.
In 2024, Western outlets produced roughly 60 percent of the international stories primarily about Israel, while outlets in Muslim-majority countries accounted for approximately 27 percent, according to the analysis.
What the Data Shows
What the data does show is the scale and persistence of the disparity. Across nearly a decade of international news coverage, Israel repeatedly received far more attention per capita than comparable countries, including during relatively quiet periods. After October 7, that gap widened further, while attention remained elevated far longer than coverage of several other major wars and humanitarian crises.