The Media Accountability Project  

I am writing on behalf of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) regarding inaccurate reporting in a broadcast and article about the Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE) report. The broadcast aired on the CTV News Channel in Toronto during CTV News Weekend on August 9, 2026, at around 10:15 am. It was also broadcast on many other CTV stations. The article version also contains errors, it is titled “‘Systemic’: Students speak out about antisemitism on Canadian campuses.” (For ease of reference, the broadcast version of the story can be easily viewed at the top of the article link.)

I will first focus on the broadcast, as CTV News is expected to follow the journalistic standards and ethics set out by the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council. Next I demonstrate there are inaccuracies in the article version, which is bound by CTV’s Editorial Standards and Policies and its promise to “promptly correct significant errors of fact in its journalism.” I also will raise concerns about what I believe constitutes a conflict of interest violation under the RTDNA code of ethics. Finally, I will raise how this situation amounts to a double standard carried out by CTV News towards its journalists.

Broadcast version issues

The following statements about the CASE report during the broadcast were problematic:

• “In the government-commissioned survey of 900 Jewish students across the country.”

• “The survey found 96 per cent of respondents experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the past year, almost one-fifth of incidents involved faculty members, and 68 per cent said their campus isn’t safe for Jewish students.” 

• “The report found more than half of students avoid Jewish symbols…” 

CTV’s coverage fails to mention necessary caveats about the survey data that have been raised by Jewish groups like Independent Jewish Voices, as well as in a recent Globe and Mail article by members of the Jewish Faculty Network who referred to the report as “partisan” and called out its flawed methodology.

1. The CASE report itself specifies that the survey recruitment “was facilitated by Jewish student organizations on campus, Jewish community networks, and related dissemination channels.” Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) raised serious concern that the survey excluded “progressive, anti-Zionist, and non-Zionist segments of the Jewish community.” The authors of the CASE report acknowledged that there was “uneven mobilization across student and community networks.” 80% of the respondents were from Ontario and Quebec, so the results cannot be regarded as nationally representative. Academics from the Jewish Faculty Network provided a scathing assessment:

“By defining anti-Zionism as a call for annihilation or erasure, the report writes an entire wing of Jewish political thought out of the category ‘Jewish’ and files it instead under ‘threat.’ This is compounded by how the report gathered its data. It recruited Jewish respondents through Hillel and Chabad – the networks least likely to reach non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jewish students – and excluded non-Zionist Jewish groups, like Independent Jewish Voices. A survey that can’t hear from Jews like us, filtered through a definition that casts our views as hatred, doesn’t measure antisemitism. It confirms its own premises.”

These glaring issues are glossed over by the broadcast, which fails to mention the exceptional, critical limits and partisan nature of the report.

1. The CASE report’s section on Methodology specifically states that the data is “not weighted.” Thus, despite the strong indicator that the survey suffers from extreme selection bias by the groups it chose to disseminate the survey through, the data cannot be treated as broadly representative of the Jewish community. The authors of the report acknowledge this.

2. The report is explicit that “The Jewish-sample results are therefore reported as valid percentages among respondents who answered each item and are interpreted descriptively rather than as precise population estimates.” 

It is fortunate that the segment did at one point mention that the results were tied to the “respondents” of the survey, but without mentioning the essential methodological facts above, the survey results are easily misinterpreted as being broadly representative. It was inaccurate when the broadcast stated, “The report found more than half of students avoid Jewish symbols.” For the reasons given above, this claim was a factual error.

I believe that these issues merit an on-air clarification regarding the methodology of the report and the specific limitations named by the CASE report’s authors. I encourage you to cover the criticisms of IJV and the Jewish Faculty Network to ensure your coverage is balanced and fair.

Issues with digital article version

The article refers to “the aftermath of the 2023 massacre of Jews by Hamas.” This is an unusual description of the events of October 7, and one that I believe is inappropriate in a journalistic context. To be sure, October 7 involved the massacre of Jewish people, that is not in question. However, October 7 was an attack on Israel, an occupying force, carried out by Palestinian fighters from occupied territory. To reductively describe this attack as simply a “massacre of Jews” is to strip it of all context and violate the journalistic standard of fairness and accuracy. Hundreds of those killed in Israel were soldiers, and many others were not Jewish. This is not to be read as a defense or justification, but the relevant facts that are all obfuscated by the description of October 7 used in this article. It is also unfortunate that despite raising October 7, there is no mention of the over 70,000 Palestinians massacred by Israel, their deliberate targeting of children, or that Gaza is an occupied territory facing what numerous human rights organizations conclude is a genocide. I urge CTV News to update its description of October 7.

The article contains a clear inaccuracy. It states:

“The Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE) report found 96 per cent of Jewish students experienced or witnessed antisemitism on Canadian campuses in the past 12 months. Nearly one of five of those incidents – 18 per cent – involved faculty members.”

This claim is not true — the survey results are limited to the specific respondents, as the data is not weighted, was not broadly representative, and the authors specifically state it cannot be used as a “precision population estimate” as is done here. I urge CTV News to issue a correction to this blatantly inaccurate claim.

I am also concerned by the editorializing tone of the article, and in particular, describing Carleton’s response as a “vague statement”:

“Carleton did not say anything specific in response to CTV News’ questions about Barett-Taller’s experience or the findings of the new report but sent a vague statement.”

The statement did not strike me as vague. I believe this should also be addressed, as it is inappropriate to use such editorializing language. I fear that this language represents the exact bias I believe the article’s author may harbor, based on her public activity.

Undisclosed conflicts

I am also concerned that Abigail Bimman serves on the board of the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship (CHES) in Ottawa, which has been repeatedly supported by the Embassy of Israel in Canada (as I will share evidence of), yet she was still assigned this story, which has a clear overlap with her advocacy work related to antisemitism. 

To be clear, I do not believe there is any issue whatsoever with Bimman doing advocacy work, but I do believe such decisions prevent her from covering a story like this. At the absolute bare minimum (and I believe this would still not have been good enough), CTV News should have provided a clear disclosure.

Here are a number of facts that demonstrate conflicts of interest that reasonably lead to the perception of bias:

1. Bimman emceed a 2022 event in which she delivered a message to the audience on behalf of the Embassy of Israel. You can listen to the message she delivered here, and you will note that Israel sponsored Bimman’s event and celebrated their partnership with CHES. Israel has been leading the effort to define anti-Zionism as antisemitism, which the CASE report does. Some of the interviewees that Bimman talked to for her reporting mentioned Israel.

2. As you can also watch in the event video, she asks viewers for donations to CHES, specifically stating that the organization exists to “support the fight against antisemitism.” Her organization specifically refers to the rise of antisemitism as a reason to donate, so it’s inappropriate that she is covering antisemitism for CTV News and then asking for donations to her organization based on the rise of antisemitism. 

3. Bimman emceed a CHES-affiliated event that dealt with contemporary antisemitism, which promoted the participation of Deborah Lyons who commissioned the CASE report on behalf of the Canadian government. It is reasonable that Bimman's activity with CHES could lead to the perception of bias.

4. Cary Kogan, an Advisory Board Member for the CASE report, has been individually promoted by CHES for their work. 

5. The CASE report’s primary author, Jack Jedwab, was a speaker for a 2020 event hosted by CHES.  

6. In a post on X, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) promoted the segment, specifically naming Bimman, and linked to a press release about the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics (NECA), which CHES has also promoted. 

7. CHES has promoted events that deal with antisemitism on campus, which features an author from the report as well as a leader of CIJA. Ultimately, Bimman is extensively intertwined with the advocacy efforts of groups like CIJA and B’nai Brith, yet she still cites their work without disclosing her ties to them.

8. We are concerned that this is not the first time Bimman has failed to disclose her conflicts regarding Israel. Despite her collaboration with the Embassy of Israel for her events, she still covered Israel’s attacks on UNRWA for Global News and Canadian funding for the organization. This was a gross violation of journalistic ethics that never should have been allowed to occur by Global News, and shows that Bimman has previously failed to disclose her conflicts.

To sum up, Bimman has provided positive coverage to the very individuals her advocacy organization celebrates and depends on for support. Worse yet, her organization has received notable support from Israel, yet she has not recused herself from covering issues related to it.

Bimman should have recused herself from reporting on this story, in accordance with the RTDNA Journalistic Ethics code, which states, “We will govern ourselves on and off the job in a manner that avoids conflict of interest, real or perceived. When conflicts are unavoidable, they should be disclosed.” 

Again, given that the mission of CHES is directly tied to raising awareness about and combatting antisemitism, it is reasonable to perceive bias. I believe this potential bias shows up in some of the issues with the broadcast and article versions of the story. I do not make this allegation lightly. At the minimum, her affiliation should have been disclosed in accordance with the RTDNA code of ethics. Ultimately, the perception of bias is unavoidable because covering the report in this manner has the potential to give benefits to the organization whose board the journalist serves on. As the CBSC has previously stated in a decision, conflicts of interest do not have to be financial, they merely need to represent “public relations value” or “positively benefit” an entity's “public image.” I believe that this report by Abigail Bimann fits those criteria, as CHES is closely affiliated with the CASE report’s authors and is supported because it “combats” the antisemitism described in this reporting.

A double standard

In October 2023, CTV News fired a Palestinian journalist, Yara Jamal, for expressing support for Palestinian human rights and criticizing Israel and Zionism. That decision was wrong, and the nearly three years that followed that incident show Yara Jamal was correct to criticize Israel, its occupation, and the ideology of Zionism that has so often been employed to justify egregious human rights violations against Palestinians that continue to this day.

Conclusion

CTV News should issue an on-air correction to the broadcast version of the story, add an editor's note to the article version, disclose the journalist's affiliations, and apologize for holding Palestinian reporters to a different standard than their peers.

Sincerely,

Jason Toney

Director of Media Advocacy, CJPME