Google Trends Shows Us When The Western Media Started Caring About The Gaza Famine

Since March, Israel has been actively starving Palestinians by not letting any food into the Gaza Strip in what can be described as the "Fastest Starvation Campaign in Modern History".

During this period, images and coverage of this starvation has been mainly absent from mainstream media outlets all while they have flooded social media during that same period.

However, in the past week, it seemed that news coverage had finally shifted to actually covering the starvation campaign. But I wanted to see if this was more of an anecdotal experience of mine or was it something more than that.

After doing some digging, it's clear it was something more than just anecdotal.

Google Trends Shows A Clear Shift In Search Interest for "Gaza Famine" Starting on July 20th

If we look at Google Trends for the phrase "Gaza famine", there is a clear increase on July 19th-20th that continues to increase in the following days.

This indicates something changed on that particular day which has cascaded into a significant cascading effect in the attention paid to the famine.

This interest is even more stark when I filter for "News Search" for that specific phrase, which shows a clear start on July 20th for the phrase as well.

This peak is also shown if you look at Wikipedia pageviews for "Gaza Strip famine", which also starts to peak on July 20th as well.

To me this behavior indicates that something happened on July 20th that has driven this increase in interest in the famine in Gaza, and I believe it's because of the behavior of Western News outlets.

Western News Outlets Start Increasing Coverage of Famine On Same Day Search Interest Increased

When I search for Gaza famine in Google, the results I get on July 20th are significantly different than the ones I get from July 1st to July 19th.

Below is a screenshot showing the top 5 news results from the two time periods next to each other, with the 1-19 period on the left and the 20th on the right.

The main difference is the inclusion of western news outlets on the right side versus them being absent on the left.

This is also true when I searched for "Gaza starving" for those dates, which actually has PBS included in the top 5 results on the right versus on the left.

In addition to Google Searches, I specifically looked at the results for "gaza famine" on CNN, Washington Post and NYTimes, and the pattern shows a clear increase in the number of articles covering that topic on July 20th/21st versus the prior period (the two periods seperated by the dotted line).

To me it's clear that, on July 20th, something shifted among Western News outlets that led them to start covering the famine that had been taking place since March. This choice led to a major increase in search interest for the Gaza famine, which has helped propel it into the mainstream discourse.

And given the fact that now Israel has stated pausing some of its operations to allow some aid, it's clear this increased pressure from these outlets has at least helped increase pressure on Israel enough to get them to change action, albeit temporarily.

What this shows is the power Western Media had that they chose to ignore for over 4 months, enabling the forced starvation campaign by abdicating their responsibility to hold power to account.

They are a major reason why this campaign continues to this day, and even though they are finally starting to do the right thing, they should be held accountable for essentially ignoring it for so long.