The Media Accountability Project  

Beyond the lack of context, the announcer’s tone is dismissive and disturbingly jovial for a segment about a two-year genocidal siege. The whole thing is a masterclass in whitewashing crime. Shameful.

The organizations you name are, of course, well within their rights to advocate for whatever legislation they see fit, and we readily acknowledge that their stance on Israel is irrelevant when they comment on matters unconnected to Israel and Palestine. In this case, however, their support for Israel is clearly relevant to their advocacy of Bill C-9 and so to omit any mention of it deprives the reader of the context required to fully understand the perspective that informs key points of the joint statement to which you refer.

The Canadian Association of Journalists’ ethics guidelines state that “Any vested interest or potential bias on the part of a source” should be divulged. Nothing is said of potential bias of the unnamed source. What was their motivation? The authors do not ask this question in the article nor give an explanation. The examples given later in the article do not suggest there are any imminent threats to Canadian national security, therefore this aspect is unclear.

This essential context is missing from your segment, and its absence produces a narrative that obscures Israel’s ongoing violations of Lebanese territory (especially when juxtaposed with the previous segment showing the resilient people of Gaza rebuilding after the so-called ceasefire) - ultimately whitewashing the illegality of this wall construction.

"Why has it been completely omitted that Gabriella Bodis is wearing a sweater emblazoned with the insignia of a group that Canada deems a terrorist organization (see: Kahane Chai — though it seems the sweater might specifically be for the Jewish Defense League, which the FBI considers a terrorist organization and is part of the Kahanist movement)?"

It may be a sad fact that Palestinians will ultimately have no choice but to bend to American and Israeli diktats in order to stop the genocide against them, but that does not make it right – or in accordance with basic journalistic norms – to report those diktats as though they were banal facts of life. That is an editorial position that has no place in news reporting.

I am concerned about the words that CBC uses in this and other reports to describe the status of the ceasefire that began on October 10. Rarely is any information provided to describe the ways in which the ceasefire has been violated since it began on October 10.

The Israeli army is currently carrying out a genocide in Gaza, has maintained a brutal military occupation of the Palestinian territories for decades, enforces an apartheid system that institutionalizes the ongoing dispossession, dehumanization, subjugation, degradation, humiliation of the Palestinian people.

An omission like this amounts to blatant dehumanization of Palestinians and serves the interests of Israel rather than the truth. This is precisely the kind of reporting that deceives Canadians and enables complicity in a horrific genocide. 70,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered, children have been starved to death and 2 million Palestinians are living in tents and rubble with barely enough food and water. In the face of this all, CityNews continues to report heavily on Israelis and their concerns.

Figures released by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) show that Israel has committed thousands of ceasefire violations since its implementation, among them over 2,000 armed assaults and nearly 6,000 breaches of Lebanese airspace north of the Blue Line since November 2024.