College Newspapers Single Out Israel for Opprobrium, New Study Says

College newspapers tend to paint Israel in bad light, according to a new report by the Alums for Campus fairness, a US watchdog monitoring antisemitism in higher education.

Released on Monday, the report titled “Institutional Bias: Campus Newspapers and Israel” surveyed college newspapers at 75 US colleges. It said that only 17 percent of 1,450 articles they have published about Israel since 2017 were positive.

“These same newspapers are notably silent on antisemitism and discrimination against Jews on their own campuses, publishing only 505 news articles about this growing trend in their own community,” ACF said Monday. “Campus media is extremely biased against Israel.”

A majority of editorials assessed — 307 out of 585 — portray Israel negatively, the report noted. 

“We reject the idea that the historical suffering of our communities be leveraged to defend an ethnostate that murders human rights journalists, detains Palestinian children, and deflects these conversations at all costs with perilously false accusation of antisemitism,” the co-presidents of Stanford University’s Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) chapter wrote in one example from 2019 cited by the report.

ACF argued that student authors seldom conceal their contempt for Israel and appropriate “the language of anti-Israel activists.” Others maintain that antisemitic incidents that follow activity by proponents of the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement are not linked. 

When, in 2020, a swastika was graffitied on Columbia University’s campus in the days leading up to a student referendum on divestment from countries that do business with Israel, a correspondent for the Columbia Daily Spectator wrote, “there is no data to support the relationship between the passage of BDS resolutions at universities and antisemitic hate crimes.” 

Several antisemitic graffiti incidents also happened at Syracuse University between 2019 and 2020, but its campus newspaper, The Daily Orange, “never mentioned Judaism or Jews.” 

“Some campuses do not mention antisemitism as a prejudice against the Jewish people,” the report continued. “Other news reports, meant to describe events on campus dispassionately, present bias by… failing to provide context or counterpoints.” 

Of all the campus newspapers surveyed by ACF, New York University’s, Harvard University’s, Stanford University’s, and University of California-Berkeley’s, published the most negative stories about Israel, combining for a total of 101. 

“College newspapers are obsessed with Israel,” ACF concluded. “75 schools have published nearly 1,500 stories about a small country thousands of miles away.”