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Speaker: Dina Matar Professor, Political Communication and Arab Media, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) - Israel’s latest war against Gaza that began in October 2023 has exposed existing contradictions and limitations in mainly Western legacy media’s role as purveyors of facts and their relationship to news elites as sources for news of somewhere else. These contradictions have been exacerbated by the excessive mediation of the Gaza war, the explosion in user-generated content related to the war, the weaponisation of journalistic objectivity, the ‘newsification’ of social media platforms and the strategic use of artificial intelligence and propaganda warfare by Israel to justify its actions. While acknowledging all these factors, this talk addresses two long-standing and interlocking news practices – the ‘first framing’ of events and the elite news sources that produce these frames. In order to do so, I use empirical research based on comparative analysis of the first week of news coverage of the war by the BBC as one of the most important Western legacy media institutions and the Qatari-funded Al-Jazeera English (AJE) as the foremost media institution in the Global South covering issues related to Palestine-Israel. The comparative frame analysis is necessary to underline the interlocking dynamic between first framing of news and news elites uttering them and how this dynamic sets the agenda for news coverage and reorients the intended audiences to think about issues in a way that reinforces the main ideological intentions of the news elite. The comparison is also important to reflect on the continued and persistent anti-Palestinian bias in the Western legacy media, which has been noted in previous studies.