Less than 40% of CBC's reporting on Israel-Hamas conflict was 'balanced': study by Jewish group

Less than 40 per cent of CBC’s reporting on the Israel-Hamas conflict was “balanced or neutral,” finds a new study by a Jewish advocacy group.

B’nai Brith Canada also found that more than 50 per cent of CBC’s news articles and videos included in the study met its threshold for pro-Palestinian bias, while less than seven per cent met the threshold for pro-Israel bias. This was based on a sample of 299 items published between Oct. 1, 2024 to April 30, 2025.

The pieces reviewed included reporting on military operations, humanitarian conditions, diplomatic initiatives, hostage negotiations and Canadian domestic implications, such as protests or antisemitic-related incidents.

The purpose of the report is to evaluate “whether CBC’s English-language online coverage during that period met public-broadcaster expectations of balance and impartiality.”

“For generations, CBC has been a fixture in Canadian homes: trusted, valued, and woven into our national life. This is not about factual inaccuracies or intentional distortions. It’s about what Canadians deserve: a public broadcaster they can count on for neutral, impartial, and fair reporting,” the group wrote in a post on X about the study.

“It’s time for the CBC to regain that trust.”

B’nai Brith Canada said it was requesting a meeting to review the study’s findings with CBC.

“We routinely get requests by special interest groups interested in meeting with us in order to influence our coverage of the news,” Chuck Thompson told National Post. He is CBC’s head of public affairs.

“We generally decline these requests in order to safeguard the independence of our journalism. However, we are open to criticism and will review this report closely as we do all public and private communication.”

While the CBC’s recurring patterns of framing, contextual omission, presentation, and sourcing are “consistent” with the dynamics of conflict reporting, the study says, such patterns should not be found in the context of Canadian public broadcasting.

That is at the heart of the issue, researchers explained, and “raises questions about institutional practices and standards.”

The CBC has faced scrutiny about its coverage of Israel-Hamas conflict from many in the Jewish community since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists murder 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, sparking a war in the Middle East.

In February, an intervention was filed over “continuing concerns about the CBC’s pattern of inaccurate, unfair, and unbalanced news coverage of Israel” after October 7 on behalf of Jewish advocacy group the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and HonestReporting Canada, a pro-Israel watchdog group.

In September, a Radio-Canada journalist was placed on leave for what CIJA referred to as “antisemitic” comments she made on air. In October, CBC’s president and CEO Marie-Philippe Bouchard told the Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage that she condemned the comments made by the journalist — but said the broadcaster didn’t “have to stop everything to do a full investigation” into antisemitism.

The study notes that the CBC has a unique role as a public broadcaster and has “a statutory obligation to provide balanced and impartial coverage of matters of public interest.”

“That responsibility is especially consequential in the context of protracted and highly contested international conflicts, where reporting choices can shape public understanding, influence domestic discourse, and affect social cohesion,” the study says.

Thompson said CBC News was made aware of the study earlier on Monday. It said it was not “involved or consulted prior to its release.”

“Since the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, CBC News has published thousands of stories on the conflict in Gaza on all of our platforms; the sample examined by the B’nai Brith study includes only a portion of that coverage. We invite the public to review the breadth and depth of our work on this complex and polarizing story,” Thompson said, providing a link to its coverage.

“As with all its journalism, CBC’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza is bound by our rigorous Journalistic Standards and Practices (JSP), the foundational principles of which are fairness, accuracy, balance, integrity and impartiality.”

Thompson said CBC News is “accountable to the independent CBC Ombud.” Since the start of the conflict, he said that the Ombud has conducted formal reviews of audience complaints of their reporting, but none have found its coverage “violated our journalistic standards of impartiality.”

The study does not intend to single out any journalists, B’nai Brith says, but is meant to indicate that there are “structural pressures that shape coverage in predictable ways,” such as “heavy reliance on international humanitarian organizations, foregrounding of humanitarian impact without equivalent causal context, asymmetrical emotional language, and selective omission of initiating actions are all practices that fall well within standard journalistic norms.”

Researchers also found that, on average, there was a negative tone toward Israel and the Jewish community.

“Fair and balanced reporting matters because the way this conflict is covered shapes how people understand it and how they respond,” writer and pro-Israel advocate Aviva Klompas told National Post.

“For Canadians, this matters because distorted reporting hardens views, deepens polarization, and undermines trust in media and public institutions. It also creates a climate in which Jews are blamed for events thousands of miles away, based on false or incomplete information.”

She added: “When coverage crosses from reporting into pushing a narrative, it puts real people at risk.”

The study recommends that CBC have periodic, internal structural reviews of conflict-related coverage. It says that its editorial standards should have clearer internal guidance regarding contextual completeness and sourcing practices, and that it should increase institutional awareness of how narrative framing and emotional emphasis accumulate across coverage as a whole.

Researchers acknowledged the study’s limitations, included its scope and timeline, and that it did not assess Radio-Canada, CBC’s French-language counterpart. The 299 items were coded across four independently defined dimensions of structural bias: framing, selection of contextual information, presentation and language, and sourcing. “Each dimension was coded using explicit thresholds and a binary scoring system,” the study says.

“These findings do not suggest factual inaccuracy, unethical conduct or deliberate advocacy by CBC journalists,” researchers said. “They point instead to recurring structural patterns that, in aggregate, produce a skewed interpretive environment.”

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