HonestReporting Says Major Outlets Minimized October 7 in Some Coverage, With a Peak in 2024
The pro Israel media watchdog says six major outlets minimized the Hamas massacre in up to 29% of the coverage it sampled, but its own figures peak in 2024, and some anniversary reports this week led with Israeli mourning.
The pro Israel media watchdog HonestReporting published an analysis on Wednesday, October 7, the third anniversary of the Hamas massacre, arguing that six of the most influential news organizations in the English speaking world have repeatedly played down the attack. The study, by Sharon Levy, examined coverage by the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press, The New York Times, CNN and The Guardian.
Its central claim is that a meaningful share of their reporting minimized the October 7 attack, in which Hamas terrorists murdered about 1,200 people and abducted 251. HonestReporting's own numbers, however, show the problem peaking in 2024 rather than worsening year after year.
What the study counted
HonestReporting says it reviewed 431 pieces across three windows: October 7 to 9, 2023, the first days after the attack, and October 4 to 10 in both 2024 and 2025, the weeks around the first and second anniversaries.
By the monitor's count, 15 of 162 pieces from 2023 minimized the attack, about 9%. In 2024 the figure rose to 36 of 126, about 29%. In 2025 it fell to 21 of 143, about 15%. The classifications are HonestReporting's own judgments of each item.
The watchdog's criticism
The watchdog accuses the outlets of two habits in particular: obscuring who carried out the killings, and moving the focus of anniversary coverage away from the attack itself and toward Gaza. In its reading, the victims of October 7 and the terrorists who murdered them gradually recede from stories that are meant to mark the day.
How October 7 is described has been contested from the start. Qatar's prime minister now calls it a massacre, although on the day itself Doha blamed Israel for the escalation, as Israel News Pulse reported. The study arrives as Israel marked the third anniversary of the attack this week.
This year's coverage offered counterexamples
The sample ends in 2025, and reporting on this year's anniversary shows that some major outlets gave October 7 prominent treatment. Reuters placed Israeli remembrance in both the headline and the opening of its October 7 report marking three years since the attack, pairing it with Palestinian mourning over the destruction in Gaza.
The Associated Press report the same day opened at the memorial for the music festival attacked on October 7 and described Israeli mourning before turning to Gaza. The Guardian, one of the six outlets in the study, published a feature on October 6 about the trauma of survivors three years on, naming former hostages Keith and Aviva Siegel.
