Media Bias in Framing Violence in the Israeli Palestinian-Conflict: How Language Shapes Public Perceptions of Agency and Accountability

Please join us on April 27, 2026 for our PACS-SCANCOR seminar series featuring Siwar Hasan-Aslih, Assistant Professor of Psychology at UC Santa Cruz!

Topic: Media Bias in Framing Violence in the Israeli Palestinian-Conflict: How Language Shapes Public Perceptions of Agency and Accountability

News media play a central role in shaping popular narratives and public understanding of intergroup conflict and violence. In particular, media reportage of intergroup violence may use linguistic forms that serve to minimize the visibility and recognition of violence and erase the responsibility of perpetrators.

Combining text analysis and experimental methods, this study examines the prevalence and consequences of bias in news reports in the context of the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine. Analyzing thousands of news headlines and reports on intergroup violence across major news outlets, we identify recurring linguistic patterns that obscure perpetrator agency, including passive constructions, agent omission, nominalization, and intransitive verbs. Our analyses further reveal notable differences across outlets in the use of these patterns, with outlets such as The New York Times and Al Jazeera differing in how frequently they rely on agency-obscuring language.

To examine the consequences of these patterns, we conduct three experiments with U.S. respondents (total N ≈ 3,500), including one preregistered study. We find that exposure to news reports using these linguistic forms, compared to reports employing active voice, reduces perceptions of perpetrator responsibility, intent to harm, and motivation to hold perpetrators accountable. These findings suggest that linguistic choices in news media may serve to condone intergroup violence, functioning as a tool of discursive oppression.

About Siwar Hasan-Aslih

Siwar Hasan-Aslih is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research investigates the social and psychological processes that sustain or challenge systems of power and oppression. Her recent work examines when and how collective action emerges in repressive contexts, how people respond to the repression of social movements, and patterns of American public opinion on the Palestinian–Israeli conflict.

Siwar’s work spans diverse contexts, including Israel/Palestine and the United States, and employs a range of quantitative methods including experiments, cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys, and large-scale observational data.  She is committed to amplifying non-mainstream perspectives in psychological science and increasing the representation of marginalized populations in research. 

Her scholarship has appeared in leading journals, including Social Psychological and Personality Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Before joining UC Santa Cruz, Siwar was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Politics and Polarization Lab and an affiliate of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. She earned her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Groningen through a joint program with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Haifa.

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