Online news coverage of female perpetrators during the October 2015 wave of violence of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Abstract

Based on the authors’ understanding regarding the effect of ethnocentric coverage, on one hand, and the tendency of the media to cover female perpetrators differently, on the other, the current study aimed to examine how leading Israeli news websites ( N = 1,832) covered female versus male perpetrators during the October 2015 wave of violence. Their goal was to examine if differences between the coverage of female and male perpetrators exist, or if all perpetrators are grouped together and depicted as a single common enemy. In other words, they sought to understand the intersection of two journalistic tendencies: (1) does the ethnocentric frame hold consistently, or (2) do gender considerations overpower the consistent ethnocentric frame? Findings indicate that there were significant differences in how male and female perpetrators were covered by the media. Articles regarding female perpetrators included more information about their personal, familial and mental states than for males. Moreover, more information was given regarding female perpetrators’ motives, which were mostly ideological. Unlike in previous studies, the authors failed to find an emphasis on female perpetrators’ physical appearance. A possible explanation may come from the dominance of the ethnic framing exemplified by the Israeli media.