Qualitative comparative analysis examines media framing of the Gaza war in British YouTube coverage, suggesting significant implications for genocide normalization.
This study examines how major British news organizations frame the Gaza war through YouTube video journalism, focusing on linguistic and paratextual elements that structure audience interpretation in platform-based news. Using a qualitative comparative design, it analyzes coverage by the BBC, The Telegraph, and Daily Mail World, examining video titles, on-screen captions, and spoken narration. The findings reveal a clear convergence across outlets that are conventionally understood to differ in editorial orientation. Across all three organizations, coverage is structured by security-centered framing, unequal representation that dehumanizes Palestinian lives, and genocide-blindness, defined as the systematic absence of legal, moral, and human frameworks necessary to recognize large-scale civilian destruction as genocide. Large-scale destruction of Palestinian civilian life is depoliticized and detached from responsibility, while Israeli military action is framed as intentional and legitimate, normalizing genocide as a justified outcome of war.
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Semra Demirdiş (2026) studied this question.