On Gaza, Canada’s public broadcaster betrays its mandate

 

The CBC has shielded its audience from key facts and context, ensuring moral indifference and passive complicity

Anyone who has doubted the Chomsky-Herman propaganda model of mass media has surely had their skepticism tested over the past 22 months. The axiom that media “serve to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state” by distorting or suppressing facts is nowhere more evident than in Western reporting on Gaza. Likewise, the model’s depiction of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims—portraying “murderous aggression as a defense of freedom”—perfectly encapsulates mainstream coverage of Israel’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians. Consent for this barbarity could not have been manufactured without the uniform complicity of a pliant press. Public media should provide a corrective to corporate distortions; yet Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC, has repeatedly failed in this duty. By refusing to deliver accurate, comprehensive, and contextually rich reporting on Israel’s assault, it has denied Canadians the information they need to act on conscience and to pressure their government to help end the savagery. In effect, the CBC has made Canadians complicit in genocide.

Like other Western media, Canadian coverage of Gaza suffers from a structural bias rooted in concentrated ownership. Postmedia Network, controlled by a US-based hedge fund, controls roughly 112 Canadian newspapers, all pushing a uniform pro-Israel editorial line. Its flagship, the National Post, churns out content that reads as though it were ghostwritten by Likud—if not for the simplistic formulations more fitting for a middle-school newsletter. Faced with this bleak media landscape, many Canadians turned to the CBC, expecting a more impartial perspective. What they found was a public broadcaster that mirrored the same misleading narratives and manipulative reporting, offering coverage no more reliable than its corporate counterparts. And as Canadians voiced frustration, the CBC responded not with reform, but with craven, self-justifying apologetics.

As with its Western peers, the CBC has systematically stripped essential context from its reporting. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, was rarely framed against the backdrop of Israel’s 75-year occupation, repeated international-law violations, or dozens of UN Security Council resolutions condemning its conduct. As Israel’s brutal assault unfolded, the CBC downplayed or omitted critical information. Landmark legal rulings were barely acknowledged: in January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found Israel’s actions amounted to a “plausible” genocide; in July, the ICJ declared Israel’s 57-year occupation illegal; in September, the UN General Assembly voted in favour of sanctions, and arrest warrants were issued for Israeli leaders. These decisions, briefly mentioned at the time, vanished from coverage, directly contradicting the CBC’s mission “to learn, understand, and clearly explain the facts to our audience.”

During her November 2024 visit to Canada, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese presented an opportunity to probe the nation’s legal obligations and Israel’s atrocities. CBC ignored Albanese’s calls for a Canadian audit of collaborations with Israel, failed to cover her report documenting Gaza’s “scorched-earth catastrophe,” and did not report that her meetings with Canadian officials were abruptly cancelled, which she attributed to “very vocal, very virulent, very aggressive” pressure from pro-Israel lobby groups. These omissions deprived Canadians of essential knowledge that might have compelled political action.  (more...)

On Gaza, Canada’s public broadcaster betrays its mandate