Media watchdog HonestReporting.com has determined that The New York Times is biased against Israel. The organization discovered that most headlines concerning attacks are written in the active style when concerning Israel, but in the passive when concerning Arab terrorists, who usually are called "militants."
It cited several headlines, such as "Israeli Force Kills 9 in Gaza" in contrast with "Rocket Fired from Gaza Kills Woman in Southern Israel." In 22 articles that dealt with Israeli counterterrorist operations, the headline writers used the words "Israel kills" and "Israel shoots." However, a large majority of headlines describing Arab attacks omitted the names of the terrorist attackers and focused on the weapon, as in "Rockets Hit Israel Whose Strikes Kill 5" and "Suicide Attack in Israel Kills One."
A study of pictures in the Times stated, "Seventy-five percent of the photographs that could be objectively determined as drawing sympathy for one side or the other in the conflict favored the Palestinians. Palestinian casualties of Israeli military operations and pictures of civilians dealing with shortages in Gaza dominated Times coverage" during the time period studied.
One picture of a funeral for an Arab teacher shows relatives crying over the death, leaving the reader ignorant of a rocket attack near an Israeli playground and pre-school nursery that precipitated the counterterrorist operation that killed the teacher. The picture also did not show that the supposed school where the teacher worked was a series of huts used by terrorists to launch rocket attacks against Israel.
Another pictures showed Arabs fleeing with infants from an Israeli attack. although the accompanying article described the death of a three-year-old whose father was "a fighter" for the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization. He and his brother had fired on the IDF from alongside and inside the house that was hit by an IDF shell.