FrontPageJews.com
Measuring Israel's share of the news against real-world data
FrontPageJews.com
Change
Israel vs : coverage vs , last 30 days
Solid: each country's share of coverage
in the selected outlets for that day.
Dashed: each country's .
Every country, last 30 days
Each country's share of coverage
against its .
Dashed line is what the benchmark would predict. Countries above it are "over-covered",
countries below it are "under-covered".
python manage.py fetch_gdelt.
About
Simple equally weighted formulas based on existing statistics or on common sense are often very good predictors of significant outcomes.
Front Page Jews aims to quantify whether and to what degree Israel, the Jewish state, is over-represented in major news outlets relative to its real-world significance. To do that, it sets each country's share of coverage against the same benchmark: an equally weighted composite score based on its population, GDP and recent conflict-related deaths. Each metric can also be viewed on its own.
This formula is not meant to be perfect. It does not follow events in real time, and it does not account for other reasons a country's share of coverage might differ from what its score would predict, such as ties to an outlet's home country, religious or historical significance to the outlet's readers, or simply being safer or more accessible for reporters.
This site presents the data. It does not try to explain it. But when a country's share of news coverage consistently and significantly deviates from the benchmark, it is worth asking why.
Methodology
The US and UK are left out of every metric: the outlets are American and British, so their domestic coverage would skew the results.
Coverage data comes from the GDELT Project, which monitors news outlets worldwide. The outlets here were chosen based on how much data GDELT has for them. Its record has a few gaps, most notably a complete outage from June 15 to July 1, 2025. The line chart shows these gaps as breaks. The scatter plot uses whatever data is available for the period.
Definitions
- Israel
- Includes the West Bank and Gaza across all metrics. The site's data sources categorize these areas differently, so combining them keeps the comparison consistent. This is not intended as a statement about borders or sovereignty.
-
Each article counts once toward the "total mentions" for every country it mentions. A country's share of coverage is the number of articles that mention it, divided by the total mentions.
For example, if one article mentions Israel, Jordan and Iran, and another mentions only China, that would be four mentions in all, and each of the four countries would have a 25% share of coverage.
- Composite score
- The equally weighted average of a country's shares of the total population, GDP and conflict deaths, as a percentage.
- Population and GDP
- The World Bank's population and GDP figures for the period shown, or its latest if it has none that recent.
- Conflict deaths
- The sum over the 12 months up to and including the period shown, as counted by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), or UCDP's latest 12 months where it does not have recent enough data. The latest months come from UCDP's monthly releases, which it checks and revises later.
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