21 hours Ago By Jesse Kline
Article content Should Canadians be forced to spend their hard-earned money to fund biased, one-sided reporting on the conflict in the Middle East? It’s a pertinent question given that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is campaigning on defunding the CBC and Jewish advocacy groups are arguing that the Crown corporation is violating the terms of its broadcast license. Earlier this month, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and HonestReporting Canada (HRC) filed an “intervention” in Radio-Canada’s request to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that it be allowed to make changes to a radio transmitter in Quebec. They argue the request should not be granted because they believe the CBC is operating in violation of its own broadcasting license by failing to adhere to its “journalistic standards and practices” in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
While the complaint is unlikely to go anywhere, it’s worth paying attention to, as it provides a detailed account of the CBC’s “pattern of inaccurate, unfair and unbalanced news coverage of Israel” following the October 7 massacre, and the “lack of impartiality on the part of (its) journalists.” The blood of the Israelis who were brutally slaughtered on October 7 was still fresh on the ground when the CBC’s “director of journalistic standards” sent a memo to employees admonishing them not to refer to Hamas as “terrorists” and not to note that Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005. Even though Hamas has been listed as a terrorist organization by our own government since 2002 and had just finished raping, murdering and kidnapping hundreds of innocent civilians; and even though Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
Since then, CIJA and HRC correctly note that the CBC has blindly repeated much of Hamas’s propaganda and downplayed Israel’s version of events, while anti-Israel voices have been featured “with such regularity and consistency that to see it as a coincidence would be difficult and defies credulity.” One example of this lack of balance is the CBC’s consistent attempts to legitimize the casualty statistics coming from Hamas’s health ministry without mentioning the growing body of evidence that the numbers are being manipulated to serve the terrorist organization’s propaganda purposes. This is clearly evident in a December 2023 story that devotes 1,200 words to making this case.
The piece features quotes from representatives of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and UNRWA, two organizations steeped with systemic anti-Israel bias, who assure readers that the information put out by a genocidal terrorist organization is perfectly trustworthy. It cites a study published in The Lancet that found “no obvious reason to doubt the validity” of the data, and attempts to downplay the influence Hamas has over its own health ministry. Since the story was written, numerous studies have raised serious concerns about the accuracy of the data and Hamas’s persistent claim that women and children make up a majority of the deaths.
As CIJA and HRC note, however, since then, “Multiple CBC News reports informed Canadians that The Lancet, a British journal, had made death toll allegations even higher than those made by Hamas. “And yet, not once did CBC News inform readers, viewers and listeners of the criticisms of (the) Lancet article, nor tell the public about studies which asserted that Hamas’s death toll claims were widely manipulated, statistically implausible and otherwise unreliable.” Perhaps part of the problem is that a number of the CBC’s journalists have a history of anti-Israel bias.
During the last outbreak of violence between Israel and Hamas, in May 2021 , the author of that puff piece on Hamas’s casualty counts, Mouhamad Rachini, signed an open letter accusing the Jewish state of “international human rights violations” and calling on Canadian media to be even more biased against Israel than it already was. His name was signed to a similarly biased letter in November 2023, which attempted to demonize the Jewish state and called on the media to use loaded terms such as “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” when describing Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. Similar bias has been found on Rachini’s Twitter feed.
In June 2024, he wrote that anyone who defends Israel is “a vile human being.” In response to a video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being warmly received by the U.S.
Congress the following month, he tweeted, “Just as they stand & clap for a killer, we will clap on the day when God brings justice down on oppressors like Netanyahu & those in the room with him.” And during the Paris Olympics, Rachini published a series of posts accusing Israeli athletes of celebrating or participating in “Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestine.” Journalists, of course, are entitled to their own opinions.
But reporters are supposed to be objective and unbiased in their reporting. Which makes it odd that our public broadcaster, an organization tasked with providing an unbiased account of the news and representing Canadians of all walks of life, would choose someone who has publicly displayed a bias toward one side of this highly contentious issue to write nearly a dozen stories on the Middle East conflict since the war began. Rachini’s bias has been clearly evident in his writing.
He has consistently attempted to downplay Israel’s justification for the war, using phrases such as , “Israel claims its offensive into Gaza is justified due to the October 7 attack.” He takes Hamas’s phony casualty statistics at face value but casts doubt on Israeli estimates about the number of terrorists who have been killed, claiming they were provided without evidence . And his stories often lack critical context, such as one that focused on the effects of “Israel’s attacks in Lebanon,” but never mentioned why the war started in the first place.
Rachini is by no means unique. CIJA and HRC singled out other CBC employees, such as foreign correspondent Chris Brown, who criticized Israel for killing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and Natasha Grzincic, who also signed the May 2021 anti-Israel letter and now has a senior role in the broadcaster’s digital news division. The report also sites 10 “noteworthy examples” of radio and TV shows that gave Israel’s critics extensive time to air their views without push-back or anyone to provide balance, pointing to a systemic bias that has metastasized within the public broadcaster.
This wouldn’t sting so much if Canadian taxpayers weren’t being forced to pay $1.4 billion a year to fund the CBC’s shoddy journalism. While the CRTC is unlikely to force the CBC to reform, the broadcaster needs to realize that it is in its own interest to do so.
Poilievre has ensured that the CBC is no longer the third rail of Canadian politics. It’s future is very much in question, and if it can’t maintain the trust of the communities it is supposed to serve, it will end up in the dustbin of history where it belongs. National Post jkline@postmedia.
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