Jannis Grimm, Justus Könneker, Mariam Salehi: “Hierarchies in death: coverage of Palestinian and Israeli victims in the context of October 7 and the war on Gaza”, Peacebuilding, Oktober 4, 2025, 1-16.
It is not really surprising, but nevertheless very important that it has been worked out with an open question and methodologically sound: Jannis Grimm, Justus Könneker, and Mariam Salehi can show that German media coverage of Palestinian and Israeli fatalities after October 7, 2023, was highly asymmetrical. The article, published in the interdisciplinary journal Peacebuilding, is based on a systematic, comparative frame analysis of reporting in five major German daily newspapers in the first six weeks after the Hamas massacre and the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza. Methodologically, it is based on similar studies of reporting in the English-language press; such an analysis had hitherto been lacking for the German media landscape.
Based on the work of Judith Butler (in particular her 2009 book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?), they show that and how German media coverage contributes to the unequal mournability of life. While Israeli deaths were portrayed with dignity and empathy and could be publicly mourned, Palestinian deaths were and continue to be dehumanized in the reporting, and their violent deaths are framed as inevitable or even justified.
↗ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21647259.2025.2569080#d1e668