This biased, one-sided, factually blind coverage surely explains why CBC is routinely labelled as anti-Israel, a bias many observers would equate with full-blown antisemitism, the world’s oldest hate;
According to an August 11 Blacklock’s Reporter story, the CBC continues to face criticism for avoiding the term “terrorist” in news stories, claiming this term is politically loaded. This policy, implemented before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, has led to a surge in viewer complaints.
Indeed, critics have long argued that the CBC’s “neutral” Israel stance has been biased, especially given the barbaric nature of the attacks.
More particularly, the CBC does not identify terrorists in news stories because the term reflects a “certain narrative” and is “highly politicized,” an executive wrote in a newly disclosed letter. This morally “neutral” editorial policy has drawn censure from MPs and thousands of complaints from ordinary Canadians.
The Crown broadcaster on August 8 released a 2023 letter by George Achi, then-Director of Journalism Standards, regarding CBC News’ use of the term “terrorist” in coverage of Palestinian violence. The letter was written seven months before the October 7, 2023 rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping by Hamas of hundreds of Jews in Israel, including eight Canadians.
“I acknowledge you would have liked to see a certain narrative applied to the death count of both Israelis and Palestinians in those reports, specifically by describing some as civilians and others as fighters,” Director Achi wrote to one CBC viewer. “That’s one possible angle which is sometimes used in our stories, when there is enough time to describe all the nuances that come with such qualifiers, including the highly politicized and divergent definitions of words like resistance or terrorism or even militants.”
CBC Ombudsman Maxime Bertrand, who released the letter, agreed that “terrorist” should only be used with caution. “We must always choose our words carefully, but never more so than in situations as complex and volatile as this,” she wrote.
Translation: Describing and explaining complexity and volatility, employing generally accepted moral codes, is beyond the will and competence of the CBC and its employees.
“As you are well aware, the CBC exercises extreme caution regarding use of the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ in its coverage,” wrote the Ombudsman. “The public broadcaster does not originate such terms but may use them with attribution to a source.”
Translation: the CBC can employ the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ only when other actors use them because doing otherwise would betray journalistic bias. In doing so, this national broadcaster is employing words like “combatants” and “resistance” that sanitize and normalize the most heinous of crimes, including the rape, torture, dismemberment, and murder of innocent civilians.
Most Canadians would see such sanitization and normalization as morally inexcusable.
No wonder that Director Achi was cited by MPs for issuing an October 11, 2023 directive ordering newsroom staff to avoid all reference to “terrorists” when describing Hamas gunmen who killed Jews. “Do not refer to militants, soldiers or anyone else as ‘terrorists,’” he wrote.
There is also both hypocrisy and doublespeak in the new CBC aversion to the term terrorism.
CBC records showed the network had, for years before Director Achi’s memo, routinely identified Hamas as a “terrorist group” comprised of “terrorists.”
Moreover, Canada in 2002 listed Hamas as a terrorist group.
“The CBC came out and said, ‘Well, we just don’t want our journalists to take sides and if they use the term ‘terrorist’ they will be taking a side,’” Conservative MP Rachael Thomas (Lethbridge, Alta.) told a 2023 hearing of the Commons heritage committee. “To that I would say, no doubt.”
“Of course you’re taking a side,” said MP Thomas. “What other side would you want to take when you have 1,400 people who were massacred in an evening, when you have women and girls who are raped and then murdered and then paraded through the city, when you have 40 babies who are beheaded? Whose side are you on?”
CBC coverage prompted 4,785 viewer complaints in 2023, a 45 percent increase year over year. “The shocking attacks by Hamas inside Israel and the massive response by Israel inside Gaza that followed were far and away the biggest source of complaints about CBC’s journalism,” then-Ombudsman Jack Nagler wrote in 2024.
Nagler said CBC News coverage left “room for improvement.” Examples he cited included a 2023 CBC Radio World Report that characterized the killing of Jews as a “surprise attack by Hamas militants,” resulting in casualties to both sides, as “Israeli airstrikes pounded the Gaza Strip.” Wrote Nagler: “The language throughout is antiseptic as though this had been a normal clash between two rival military forces.”
Members of the Commons heritage committee also complained CBC News was slow to correct an October 17, 2023 story that falsely claimed Israeli rockets had destroyed a hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds when the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza was actually destroyed by a misfired Palestinian rocket.
Complaints of biased reporting by Mike Fegelman, editor-in-chief of Honest Reporting Canada prompted Friday’s release of the 2023 letter. The CBC even before the Hamas attacks “egregiously whitewashed, rationalized and romanticized violent Palestinian terrorism” as an understandable response to perceived Israeli wrongdoing, he wrote. “Is it not possible other factors may have impacted and inspired recent violence?”
Fegelman has just exposed the morally reprehensible and factually empty sanitization of the CBC’s reporting of the war between Hamas and Israel. He noted, for example, that Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur has rightly argued that:
“Hamas doesn’t want the war to end. It wants a reprieve so it can recover for more war. Hamas does everything it can, murder, theft and never-ending intimidation, to disrupt aid distribution. Anyone who talks about famine in Gaza and of Israel’s manifest responsibility to prevent it but refuses to notice that Hamas actively and violently disrupts all aid channels it can’t control, that it still seeks more and endless war and destruction in Gaza because it long ago decided Gaza was a worthy sacrifice to lay on the altar of their religious redemption story— is only helping to ensure more war and suffering. What is Hamas even negotiating for anymore? It wants nothing for Gaza, does nothing for Gaza. It negotiates only for itself. There is nothing you can do for Gaza that Hamas won’t undo.”
Such viewpoints are never reported let alone analyzed by the CBC, surely a sign of journalistic bias.
Instead, one-sided reporting is as routine for the CBC as it is for all contemporary mainstream media reporting, the portrayal of Palestinian suffering always rendered as a product of a single culprit, namely the State of Israel.
This framing is no better exemplified than in a CBC News segment on The National by Nahlah Ayed on July 22, entitled “100 humanitarian organizations plead for Gaza aid to resume.” Ayed, who has consistently produced biased anti-Israel reporting, which has been documented by Honest Reporting Canada many times, set the scene for CBC viewers in an emotionally charged manner:
“Imagine the desperation it takes to wade into this.” She was referring to a scene in which a group of men crowd around an aid truck, quickly and chaotically grabbing supplies.
What followed was a quote from an interviewee injured in the crowd, Muhammad Abu Jabal, explaining how he “went to die” to provide food for his children. “This bag,” he claimed, “is soaked with blood.”
There is no attempt to consider other claims or factors that hinder the logistics of aid delivery in Gaza.
Specifically, it has been reported that the United Nations (UN) has aid sitting at the border, and aid is now distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a U.S. and Israeli-backed initiative which the UN does not recognize. Israel has pointed out that any humanitarian situation can be addressed with cooperation, and that even the delivery of the hundreds of trucks at the border would change the situation drastically. But the UN refused to cooperate with the GHF, accusing the latter of setting up operations that endanger the local population, even though it has successfully delivered tons of much-needed food to hungry Palestinians.
Hamas, unsurprisingly, is the major roadblock to the delivery of such aid. In its criticism of the GHF, the UN refuses to acknowledge that the terror group deliberately targets aid efforts it cannot directly benefit from.
As should be well known to those carefully following this conflict, “Israel’s expanded offensive into central Gaza” that Ayed claims “is threatening the last lifelines keeping Palestinians alive” is attributable to Hamas’s holding of the remaining Israeli hostages and its refusal to negotiate a ceasefire.
To further reinforce the principle of unilateral Israeli culpability, Ayed interviewed Rachael Cummings, a Save the Children team leader and frequent guest on CBC News, who remarked that, “we need humanitarian supplies to come into Gaza at scale. We need the bombs to stop dropping on children.” Another interviewee, Canadian nurse Jack Latour, described how difficult it was for her to address the needs of parents advocating for their children to get treatment for malnourishment.
Rettig Gur highlighted how the chain of responsibility is consistently traced back to one actor: Israel. And while the future does remain “uncertain,” as Ayed concluded, it remains certain that refusing to hold the terrorist group that started this all on October 7, 2023 accountable will not bring about clarity. Instead, it will only exacerbate the existing crisis.
This biased, one-sided, factually blind coverage surely explains why CBC is routinely labelled as anti-Israel, a bias many observers would equate with full-blown antisemitism, the world’s oldest hate.
Read next: Manhattan Jewish Anti-Israel Activists Try a 'Two-State Solution' with Hamas supporters on Oct 7
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