I. The Tree in the Silent Forest
There is a philosophical riddle that most people encounter as an exercise in abstraction. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The question is usually treated as a puzzle about perception and reality, a matter for undergraduate seminars and late-night conversations. In the context of modern conflict reporting, the riddle acquires a different and more urgent character. If a human life is extinguished by military force, but the grammar of the headline refuses to name the actor, does the perpetrator exist?
The question is not rhetorical. It is forensic. This essay treats media texts not as neutral records of events but as evidentiary artefacts of structural bias. The method is what might be called forensic narrative analysis: the systematic examination of grammatical, lexical, and structural choices in news reporting to determine what those choices reveal about the ideological commitments they encode. The approach draws on the tradition of critical discourse analysis developed by Teun van Dijk, Norman Fairclough, and others, but applies it with a specific focus on the mechanics of agency deletion: the process by which the actor in a violent event is removed from the sentence that describes it.
The subject of this analysis is the coverage of the 2023-2024 war in Gaza by major Western print media, principally the New York Times and the Washington Post. The findings, drawn from quantitative studies published by The Intercept, the Journal of Language Studies, and the Journalism and Media journal, reveal patterns of linguistic asymmetry so consistent that they cannot be explained by editorial oversight or the ordinary pressures of deadline journalism. They require a structural explanation. That explanation, this essay argues, is to be found not in the intentions of individual journalists but in the architecture of the media institutions themselves: an architecture that encodes a hierarchy of human value into the grammar of its sentences.
II. The Humanity Ratio: A Quantitative Foundation
Before examining the grammatical mechanisms of erasure, it is necessary to establish the empirical ground. Quantitative analysis conducted by The Intercept in 2024 measured the frequency with which Israeli and Palestinian deaths were mentioned in major American print outlets against the actual number of fatalities in each population (Johnson 2024). The resulting metric, which may be called the “Humanity Ratio,” provides a mathematical foundation for what critical discourse analysts have long argued qualitatively.
The findings are stark. For every Israeli death, the newspapers studied produced approximately eight mentions. For every two Palestinian deaths, there was approximately one mention. When expressed as a ratio of coverage per death, the disparity is sixteen to one. An Israeli life, measured by the attention the media apparatus devotes to its loss, is treated as sixteen times more newsworthy than a Palestinian life.
For every Israeli death, the newspapers studied produced approximately eight mentions. For every two Palestinian deaths, there was approximately one mention. The disparity, measured as a ratio of coverage per death, is sixteen to one.
This is not an argument about intention. Individual journalists may be entirely sincere in their commitment to impartial reporting. The ratio does not measure the sympathies of reporters. It measures the output of an institutional system, and what it reveals is that the system produces, with remarkable consistency, a calibrated hierarchy of human value. Certain lives are rendered statistically more visible, more grievable, more worthy of the reader’s emotional engagement. The calibration is not random. It follows lines of geopolitical alignment that are too stable to be coincidental.
The Humanity Ratio establishes the quantitative case. What follows is the qualitative analysis: the examination of how this hierarchy is inscribed into the grammar of individual sentences, paragraph by paragraph, headline by headline, through mechanisms so familiar that they have become invisible.
III. The Agentless Sentence: Grammar as Ideology
The most powerful instrument in the architecture of media erasure is the passive voice. Its power derives precisely from its ordinariness. The passive voice is a standard feature of English grammar, taught in every composition course, used in every newsroom, and governed by style guides that treat it as a matter of aesthetic preference rather than ideological consequence. But in the context of conflict reporting, the choice between active and passive voice is not a stylistic decision. It is a decision about whether to name the agent of violence.
Linguistic analysis conducted by Kareem and Najm (2024) and El Damanhoury, Saleh, and Lebovic (2025) reveals a consistent asymmetry in the grammatical construction of headlines and lead paragraphs covering violence in the conflict. When the agent of violence is Hamas or another Palestinian armed group, the active voice predominates. The headlines name the actor, assign the verb, and identify the victim: “Hamas strikes southern Israel.” “Hamas kills civilians.” The grammatical structure is transitive: a subject acts upon an object. Agency is clear. Responsibility is assigned.
When the agent of violence is Israel, the grammatical pattern shifts. The passive voice predominates, or the construction becomes intransitive. “Gaza deaths rise.” “Palestinians dying.” “Dozens killed in airstrike.” In these constructions, death occurs without an author. The verb is either intransitive, describing a process that seems to happen of its own accord, or passive, with the agent deleted from the sentence entirely. The airstrike is mentioned. The hand that launched it is not.
The technical term for this process is agent deletion, and its ideological function has been well documented in the critical discourse analysis literature. When an agent is deleted from a passive construction, the reader receives the information that something happened but not who did it. The cognitive effect is significant. Research in psycholinguistics has demonstrated that readers process agentless passive constructions with less attribution of responsibility than active constructions describing the same event. The information is technically present, in the sense that a careful reader can infer who conducted the airstrike. But inference is not the same as statement, and the cumulative effect of thousands of agentless constructions across months of coverage is to produce a narrative in which one side’s violence is consistently authored and the other side’s violence consistently authorless.
The companion technique is nominalisation: the transformation of a verb into a noun, which has the effect of removing the actor from the grammatical structure entirely. “Israel bombed the hospital” becomes “the bombing of the hospital.” The event is preserved. The agency is dissolved. The bombing becomes a thing that exists rather than an act that someone performed.
IV. The Semantic Border: Lexical Asymmetry in the Description of Death
Beyond the grammatical structure of the sentence, there is the question of which words are chosen to describe the events themselves. The quantitative evidence here is equally revealing. Johnson’s 2024 analysis of major American print coverage found a systematic asymmetry in the deployment of emotionally charged vocabulary.
The word “slaughter” was used sixty times in reference to Israeli casualties and once in reference to Palestinian casualties: a ratio of sixty to one. The word “massacre” appeared at a ratio of approximately sixty-three to one. The word “horrifying” was used thirty-six times to describe events affecting Israelis and four times to describe events affecting Palestinians, despite the latter’s vastly higher casualty count (Johnson 2024).
These are not isolated instances of poor editorial judgement. They are patterns, and patterns of this consistency require structural explanation. The lexical asymmetry operates as what might be called a semantic border: an invisible line that determines which deaths are described in the language of atrocity and which are described in the language of statistics. On one side of the border, people are slaughtered, massacred, and subjected to horrifying violence. On the other side, casualties rise, death tolls mount, and fatalities are reported.
A particularly revealing dimension of this asymmetry concerns the description of children. Kareem and Najm’s analysis found that Palestinian children killed in the conflict were frequently described as “minors” or “people under eighteen,” clinical designations that suppress the emotional resonance of the word “child” (Kareem and Najm 2024). Israeli victims in the same age range were consistently described as “children.” The effect is not subtle. The word “child” activates a specific set of emotional and moral responses in the reader. The phrase “people under eighteen” does not. The choice between them is not a matter of journalistic precision. It is a decision about whether to activate the reader’s empathy.
Palestinian children killed in the conflict were frequently described as “minors” or “people under eighteen,” clinical designations that suppress the emotional resonance of the word “child.” Israeli victims in the same age range were consistently described as “children.”
The semantic border does not merely describe a difference in coverage. It produces a difference in perception. When the same event is described in the language of tragedy for one population and in the language of bureaucratic accounting for another, the reader is not being informed. The reader is being formed: shaped into a subject who grieves selectively, whose moral attention is directed by lexical choices so routine that they pass beneath conscious notice.
V. The Ideological Square: Orientalism as Grammatical Structure
The patterns described above are not random. They are organised by what Teun van Dijk called the “ideological square”: a four-part discursive strategy that structures the representation of in-groups and out-groups in media and political discourse (Van Dijk 1998). The square operates through four simultaneous movements: emphasise our good qualities; emphasise their bad qualities; de-emphasise our bad qualities; de-emphasise their good qualities.
Alamu and Ololade’s 2025 analysis of Western media discourse on the conflict demonstrates how the ideological square operates at every level of textual production (Alamu and Ololade 2025). At the level of framing, the conflict is presented as a confrontation between democratic civilisation and terrorist barbarism. At the level of sourcing, Israeli government and military spokespeople are quoted as authorities whose claims structure the narrative, while Palestinian voices appear, when they appear at all, as human interest material rather than as sources of analytical or political authority. At the level of contextualisation, the historical context of occupation, settlement expansion, and blockade is either absent or relegated to a subordinate clause that functions as background rather than explanation.
The ideological square is not a conspiracy. It is a structure, and structures operate without requiring conscious co-ordination. No editor need instruct a reporter to use the passive voice when describing an Israeli airstrike. The reporter has been trained within a professional culture whose norms encode the ideological square as common sense. The style guide does not say “delete the agent when describing Palestinian deaths.” It says “prefer concise constructions” and “avoid editorialising,” and the effect, consistently and predictably, is that certain agents are deleted and certain deaths are described in clinical rather than emotional language.
Peters’s analysis of the “double standards” phenomenon in international law and media criticism extends this observation into the institutional domain (Peters 2025). The selective application of legal and moral standards, whereby identical actions are condemned when performed by one party and contextualised or excused when performed by another, is not a failure of the system. It is the system operating as designed. The grammar of the headline and the grammar of international legal discourse share the same underlying structure: a hierarchy of moral attention that determines whose actions require justification and whose actions require only description.
VI. The Recovery of the Lost Agent: Truthfulness as Epistemic Correction
The Islamic intellectual tradition offers a resource for thinking about the relationship between language and truth that is both ancient and urgently relevant. The concept of sidq (truthfulness, or correspondence between language and reality) is one of the tradition’s foundational ethical categories. In the Quranic framework, sidq is not a social virtue among others. It is an epistemic obligation: the requirement that the speaker’s words correspond to the reality they purport to describe, without omission, distortion, or strategic ambiguity.
Applied to the forensic analysis conducted in this essay, sidq demands something specific and demanding. It demands the recovery of the lost agent. It demands that the sentence name the actor, describe the act, and identify the one who suffers it. It refuses the passive voice not as a grammatical preference but as a moral evasion: the evasion of the obligation to say what happened and who did it.
This is not a call for partisan journalism. It is the opposite. The concept of sidq does not require the journalist to take sides. It requires the journalist to tell the truth, and telling the truth means refusing the grammatical, lexical, and structural mechanisms by which the truth is systematically obscured. The “balance” that Western journalism claims as its highest professional value is, in practice, often a form of structured dishonesty: the equation of the occupier with the occupied, the aggressor with the victim, the party with overwhelming military superiority with the population under bombardment, presented as though these were symmetrical positions between which the responsible journalist must maintain a scrupulous neutrality.
The “balance” that Western journalism claims as its highest professional value is, in practice, often a form of structured dishonesty: the equation of the occupier with the occupied, presented as though these were symmetrical positions between which the responsible journalist must maintain a scrupulous neutrality.
A journalism grounded in sidq would not abandon impartiality. It would redefine it. Impartiality would mean not the equal distribution of attention between two “sides” but the accurate description of what is happening, to whom, and by whom. It would mean restoring the agent to the sentence, the child to the headline, and the context to the story. It would mean recognising that the passive voice, when deployed systematically to obscure the agency of a militarily superior power, is not a neutral grammatical choice. It is a political act disguised as a stylistic one.
The Islamic tradition’s insistence on the correspondence between word and reality, between lafz and ma’na, is not a quaint pre-modern ideal. It is a sophisticated epistemological position that anticipates, by more than a millennium, the central insight of critical discourse analysis: that language does not merely describe reality but constitutes it, and that the grammatical structure of a sentence is never innocent of the power relations it encodes.
VII. Conclusion: Placing the Human Being Back in the Sentence
The forensic evidence assembled in this essay points to a conclusion that is uncomfortable but unavoidable. The major Western print media do not merely report on conflicts involving differential power relations. They participate in those conflicts, through the grammatical structures they deploy, the lexical choices they make, and the frameworks of visibility and invisibility they construct. The participation is not intentional in the sense of individual bad faith. It is structural in the sense that the institutional norms of Western journalism encode a hierarchy of human value that determines whose deaths are authored and whose are merely recorded, whose suffering is described in the language of atrocity and whose is described in the language of statistics.
The passive voice is the instrument par excellence of this hierarchy. It is the grammatical mechanism by which the perpetrator is removed from the sentence, the agent is dissolved into the noun, and the act of killing is transformed from something someone did into something that happened. Its power lies in its banality. No one notices the passive voice. That is precisely why it works.
The recovery of the lost agent is not merely a linguistic project. It is a moral one. To place the human being back in the sentence, as subject, as agent, as the one who acts and the one who suffers, is to refuse the architecture of erasure that the passive voice makes possible. It is to insist that language correspond to reality, that grammar serve truth rather than power, and that the sentence, the most basic unit of public discourse, be made to carry the weight of what it describes.
To erase a person from a headline is the final step in erasing their humanity from the world. The work of sidq, of truthfulness as an epistemic and moral obligation, is to make that erasure impossible.
Bibliography
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El Damanhoury, Kareem, Firas Saleh, and Matt Lebovic. 2025. “Covering the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Al Jazeera English and BBC’s Online Reporting on the 2023 Gaza War.” Journalism and Media 6, no. 1.
Johnson, Adam. 2024. “Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel.” The Intercept, January 9, 2024.
Kareem, Ali H., and Yasir M. Najm. 2024. “A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Biased Role of Western Media in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” Journal of Language Studies 8, no. 3.
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Van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage Publications.