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Chapter 6 of 8

CHAPTER SIXWhat the papers also printed

This is the record, and this is its oldest part.

Before Palestine was a security story in these pages it was an agricultural one. Any account of American coverage that opens with violence opens late. The last two are the same dispatch in two papers on the same day under headlines differing by one word, the oldest wire pair in this archive, and its subject is orange groves.

Coverage of ordinary life runs through every period, including the ones where violence is heaviest:

A paper running Palestinian singers in July 1988, in the middle of the first intifada, or art in the rubble in September 2014, is doing something the hypothesis does not predict.

150 records were drawn at random from the 3,517 and read by hand. Violence is not where most of this archive lives.

0% 15% 30% 45% 60% Politics, diplomacy, rights 43.3% n=65 Violence, military action, death 36.7% n=55 Civil, cultural, economic life 13.3% n=20 Other 6.7% n=10
Subject of the headline. Random sample of 150, coded by hand. Bars are 95% confidence intervals.
The intervals are drawn, not stated. They are wide because 150 is a small sample. Politics is nominally the largest category, but its interval and violence’s overlap, so it cannot be claimed that politics outranks violence. What can be claimed is that violence is about a third, and that the top of its interval does not reach half.

IN THIS ARCHIVE

The hypothesis that Palestinians were represented primarily through violence is not supported at headline level here. Violence is 36.7% of headlines, with an interval running from 29.0% to 44.9%.

This research is still being worked through. Every count drawn from the archive is recomputed from the records each time the page is built, and every figure from outside it is printed with the query that produced it. Where a finding has changed, the correction is printed beside it rather than quietly swapped in. More of it is still being checked, and some of it will move.

Last updated 2 November 2026

Every figure about this archive is computed from the records at build time. Every figure from outside it is logged with the query that produced it.
All eight chapters · How this archive was built · What the papers repeated · Search the archive · The data
Collected, transcribed and checked by Maria Robles · maria@rozumstudio.com