The Israel-Palestine conflict, long recognized for its complexity, witnessed a significant escalation recently, as Hamas launched one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in history on Israel on October 7th, 2023. The role of the media in this conflict has, as always, been critical in shaping the public’s understanding and drawing attention to the ongoing atrocities associated with the conflict. However, despite the media's central role in this conflict, there remains a lack of longitudinal comparative studies examining how its coverage has evolved from 2014 to 2025.

To try and contribute to this gap we planned to explore whether U.S. political leadership shape the framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict in CNN and Fox News coverage or not? Through a comparative small-N case study, this thesis implemented a framing analysis based on Entman (1993) and Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) to quantitively and qualitatively analyze FOX and CNN articles covering the 2014 Gaza conflict and the ongoing conflict as of May 2025.

The quantitative analysis was done by using a coding scheme to identify and make note of the prevalence or absence of four preset frames, while the qualitative analysis was done by implementing a more In-depth analysis to precisely point out certain framing choices to discuss them. The results enabled us to compare and see the changes and consistencies in framing between the two periods, allowing us to answer our question.

The analysis concluded that in the case of FOX and CNN the U.S. political leadership did not shape their framing, that is especially the case for CNN as our analysis detected that with the rise of humanitarian costs CNNs attitude towards Israeli actions started to shift and break away, to some degree from the U.S. governments narrative. CNNs focus also started to change becoming much more focused on the humanitarian impact that the conflict is having.