Marc,

I have no quantitative research to bear this out, but what the hey; arm chair philosophizing has a long and distinguished history.

I would not be surprised that a read of the Palestionian press would have the same kind of slant, mutatis mutandis , as that reported to be found in the Israeli press, and for good reason.

When we start doing things to other folks that we are, arguably, averse to doing under normal circumstances, we need to have tools to overcome/mitigate/avoid that sense of aversion and to justify or downplay the moral breaches we may feel the practices commit. One such tool is to paint one's adversaries in a bad light, which justifies one's less than sterling conduct toward them. I suspect you have heard the line justifying extreme forms of punishment for those who commit heinous crimes, "He forfeited his right to treatment as a human being," or something similar. This is an example of the first type of tactic. Because even this form of negative labeling of others is at least a little unsettling to us, an alternative is often used. Descriptions of one's own actions are made to sound as inocuous as possible so that one so not have to admit to being a partry to wrongdoing. At one point I remember we stopped talking about killing the enemy and talked instead about "servicing targets."

Each of these tactics are present in the author's description of the "norms" the Israeli press follows when reporting on Palestinian "affairs." The BBC uses another interesting tactic on its web page--potentially offending words or phrases are put in single quotes, as in: Malayasian journalist 'murdered' in E. Timor.