The Media Accountability Project  

Without including this information, readers are left with the misleading impression that only Iran is using the ‘oil weapon’ when in reality Israel, in collaboration with the United States, is also using the ‘oil weapon’. Your headline ‘Iran is using the oil weapon’ further reinforces this misperception.

According to the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) Ethics Guidelines, journalists must ensure reporting is accurate, fair, and complete, and must not present unsubstantiated claims as established fact when credible evidence suggests otherwise. We therefore urge the Toronto Star to revise its headline so that it does not present the claim of faulty intelligence as an established fact.

The article glorifies the “joint Israeli-US opening salvo” against the Islamic Republic, while failing to mention the mounting death toll from the U.S./Israeli bombing. In particular, there is no reference to the airstrike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab that killed approximately 165 people, most of them girls, despite it occurring during the opening and illegal assault. By omitting this verified atrocity, the article fails to provide accurate, balanced information to readers. 

On March 4, 2026, CBC News published an article titled “Who bombed a girls' school in Iran? A visual investigation.”

The piece was an investigation into the U.S. and Israeli bombing of an Iranian elementary school on Saturday, February 28, which killed 165 Iranian schoolgirls aged 7-12. The article stated that the school was struck by a “precision airstrike” targeting a military complex located immediately adjacent to the building. The article was unclear in explaining whether the strike on the school itself was deliberate or the result of faulty or outdated intelligence. Beyond just the CBC, Western media appeared in a rush to express skepticism about the massacre of schoolchildren, framing it as an accident, or suggesting the perpetrators were unknown. Even with the fog of war, the evidence in this case was obvious as soon as the dust settled.

Furthermore, the article misleadingly stated that “while the facility was functioning as a school, CBC News has confirmed a previous New York Times report stating the building was once part of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base.” In reality, the site has been a school since 2016, but CBC chose to omit a decades worth of essential context.

Following CJPME’s advocacy, the revised article now clarifies that both the school and the clinic within the complex had been walled off for civilian use for roughly a decade, information that had not been included in the original version of the article.

We also challenged the article’s claim that the school was likely struck due to a “precision airstrike” targeting the adjacent military complex. Al Jazeera’s Digital Investigations Unit  analyzed two videos uploaded to Telegram shortly after the bombing and geolocated them using visible landmarks and satellite imagery.

The first video, filmed southwest of the complex, shows smoke rising from inside the Sayyid al-Shuhada military base (Asif Brigade), confirming that the military base itself was struck.

The second video, filmed from the southeast of the complex, shows two distinct columns of dense black smoke rising simultaneously, one from within the military base and another from the geographically separate location of the girls’ school.

The visible distance between the two smoke columns corresponds with the separation of the two sites in satellite imagery. Based on this evidence, Al Jazeera’s investigation concluded that the school was not damaged by debris or shrapnel from the adjacent base, but was instead struck separately. Other investigators have reached the same conclusion.

Following CJPME’s advocacy, CBC incorporated additional expert analysis from Wes Bryant, a U.S.-based military analyst and munitions expert, who stated that the available evidence suggests the strike on the school was not accidental, concluding that “this absolutely was deliberately targeted.”

The article is correct in reporting that Iran is carrying out retaliatory strikes against U.S. bases and strategic assets across the Gulf region and against Israel. It is also correct in noting that Iranian strikes have hit civilian infrastructure in Gulf countries such as Qatar and Bahrain. However, the article fails to provide important context regarding the nature of Iran’s attacks on civilian infrastructure.

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East believes Prime Minister Mark Carney should categorically rule out Canadian participation in this war. The U.S.–Israel conflict with Iran is deeply unpopular among Canadians, and even Carney stated it violates international law.

Journalistic fairness means that if you are going to point out that Iran’s retaliatory strikes have targeted countries in the Middle East that host U.S. military bases, you should also be pointing out how many countries the U.S. and Israel have bombed and how many world leaders they have murdered or forcibly removed from office in just the last two years. If you want to be fully fair and balanced, your reporting should at least occasionally be looking back over several decades at the master plan that seem to be coming to a head. This also means mentioning the Greater Israel project.

"The article does not align with journalistic standards of balance of perspectives and views. Throughout the article, the overwhelming majority of quoted voices are Iranian-Canadians celebrating the attacks, explicitly pro–U.S. and pro–Israel voices, supporters of regime change, and admirers of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. There are no voices from Iranian-Canadians who oppose foreign military intervention, anti-war Iranian diaspora members, international law experts questioning the legality of the strikes, human rights advocates concerned about civilian harm, or scholars contextualizing the consequences of regime change wars."

"On March 1, 2026, CBC aired a news broadcast on the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. During the segment, host Rosemary Barton allowed Israeli politician Yair Lapid to advocate for regime change in Iran without meaningful journalistic challenge."

"Giddy for war, the Globe and Mail's editorial board explicitly dismisses international law and endorses regime change in Iran through U.S./Israeli military force. We ask that Media responders challenge the Globe and Mail."