News Coverage of Middle Eastern Crises on the Israeli i24 Channel

Abstract

This research focuses on the news coverage provided by the Israeli i24 channel on the Palestinian-Israeli crisis, specifically analyzing the main news bulletins addressing this crisis in the Middle East and the frames adopted by the channel in covering the events from January 1, 2024, to March 31, 2024. "The media's interest in real-time coverage of various aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli crisis, including military, political, economic, social, and security matters, is evident" (Hussein 2023: 377). The researcher reached several key findings, most notably that i24's main news bulletins covering the Palestinian-Israeli crisis placed significant emphasis on military topics, highlighting them among other main issues in the crisis, with a higher frequency of coverage compared to other topics. The coverage was categorized into 7 subcategories out of a total of 25 subcategories. The biased framing by i24 in addressing the Palestinian-Israeli crisis, often through statements by the channel's director labeling Hamas as a terrorist organization, dominated other forms of framing (interpretive and objective) and emotional coverage. This suggests that the channel aimed to engage viewers by presenting the news in an emotionally charged way. Ranking third in prominence was the channel's aggressive framing, describing most defensive operations conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces as actions against Hamas terrorist elements in Gaza. It is evident that the main news bulletins addressing the Palestinian-Israeli crisis employed five methods in news processing, often utilizing more than one method in presenting the issue.