The Guardian’s continuing obsession with Israel, by the numbers

Early in 2011, we noted the following from a site called Views of the World:

To understand how British people perceive the events on the globe, one can look at how frequently a country has been mentioned in major news stories. The following map does exactly this by visualising the number of news items on the website of the British Newspaper The Guardian (data derived from their Data store).

One nation of the world, we noted, was a bit enlarged, owing to the fact that  stories tagged “Israel” represented the 5th highest country in the Guardian for 2010 (1,008 stories in all).

Well, the newest results for such country tags have just been reported by the Guardian, and, in 2011, Israel again was the continuing object of their obsession, coming in 6th (1,005 stories in all). Here is a partial snapshot of their list, noting the top 21 nations by tags. 

What particularly stands out is that Israel, a stable democracy, was covered more than war-torn Afghanistan, Syria (in a year which saw brutal violence in what may be the beginning of regime change), Greece (hit by nothing short of an economic Tsunami), Iraq (a year where terrorism and related inter-sectarian violence still claimed over 4,000 lives), Pakistan (where civil war in the northwest region of the country resulted in over 6000 dead for the year), and Tunisia (where longtime President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted in a revolution)

Even further down on the list are country’s you’d expect to receive more coverage: Turkey (326 tags), Sudan (173 tags), Bahrain (348 tags, despite an uprising against the government which resulted in many dead and several thousand arrests).

Further, as we noted in last year’s post, Israel is a nation of 7.8 million citizens, representing a little over 1/10 of 1% of the world population, and is situated on roughly 21,00 square kilometers of land which represents a bit over 1/100 of 1% of the world’s total.

Of course, the Guardian isn’t the only media group which devotes such disproportionate coverage to Israel.

However, as the institution represents the most hostile anti-Zionist voice in the Anglo world, at least, among widely read publications (with the possible exception of Al Jazeera), their malign obsession continues to represent a serious front in the cognitive war against the Jewish state.

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