Beyond the Battlefield: Framing Analysis of Media Coverage in Conflict Reporting
This addresses the problem of understanding media bias in conflict reporting for researchers and policymakers, though it is incremental as it applies existing computational methods to a specific conflict.
The paper analyzed media framing in conflict reporting on the Israel-Palestine war using computational methods, finding a higher focus on war-based reporting and substantial differences in framing across US, UK, and Middle Eastern outlets that reveal media biases.
Framing used by news media, especially in times of conflict, can have substantial impact on readers' opinion, potentially aggravating the conflict itself. Current studies on the topic of conflict framing have limited insights due to their qualitative nature or only look at surface level generic frames without going deeper. In this work, we identify indicators of war and peace journalism, as outlined by prior work in conflict studies, in a corpus of news articles reporting on the Israel-Palestine war. For our analysis, we use computational approaches, using a combination of frame semantics and large language models to identify both communicative framing and its connection to linguistic framing. Our analysis reveals a higher focus on war based reporting rather than peace based. We also show substantial differences in reporting across the US, UK, and Middle Eastern news outlets in framing who the assailant and victims of the conflict are, surfacing biases within the media.