In late 2023, two months after the invasion of southern Israel by thousands of Palestinian terrorists who carried out a large-scale massacre of Israeli civilians, CBC News published an article introducing readers to the diverse views being held by Members of Parliament (MPs) in the governing Liberal party.
The December 13 article, “Tensions emerge in the Liberal caucus over Canada’s UN vote for a Gaza ceasefire,” was written by Senior reporter John Paul Tasker.
The article, as originally published, noted that two MPs, Anthony Housefather of Montreal, and Ben Carr of Winnipeg, both of whom had spoken out against an anti-Israel United Nations vote, were Jewish. However, when quoting Toronto MP Salma Zahid, one of the country’s most vocally anti-Israel politicians, it failed to note her religious affiliation as being Muslim.
Only later, after a complaint was lodged with CBC News, did the broadcaster add her religion, with no correction noted, with a complaint calling it “stealth-edited.”
As pointed out by a reader, identifying the MPs by their religions suggests “the dual loyalty canard which is a classic antisemitic trope.”
This trope alleges that Jews, no matter where they are living or how long they have lived in that place, are invariably more loyal to Israel than to their home country. This type of rhetoric has been spread by a number of extremist anti-Israel activists, including Dimitri Lascaris, who in 2018 – who was then a member of the board for Canadians for Justice & Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) – stated that two Jewish Liberal MPs were “more devoted to apartheid Israel than to their own Prime Minister and their own colleagues in the Liberal caucus.”
He was soon condemned by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called his remarks “vile antisemitic smears.”
Further to that correspondence, a January 16 review by Maxime Bertrand, CBC’s Ombud, acknowledged that the broadcaster’s Journalistic Standards and Practices (JSP) was “breached” by the reporter in noting the religion of the MPs.
Citing the JSP, she noted that it states clearly: “we disclose information of a private nature only when the subject matter is of public interest.”
However, in the case of the MPs, she recognized that this story and topic “does not provide sufficient justification for the editorial choice at issue,” adding that “looking ahead, should a similar situation arise, it does not appear to this office to be beyond the skill and ingenuity of CBC journalists to tell such a story in a different way, without linking individuals’ names to their religions.”
The decision by CBC’s Ombud to acknowledge the failings of the news report is a step in the right direction. However, over the course of more than two years of coverage of the Hamas-Israel war, the public broadcaster has made editorial decisions which have been deeply problematic and have served to highly skew the public’s view of the Middle East in other ways.
As identified in a recent report by HR Canada Charitable Organization, CBC News’ coverage of the war has been systematically biased against Israel, demonstrating that far from being an isolated issue, the news outlet must meaningfully address not just its language in individual stories, but how it reports issues related to Israel and the Jewish community in a much more thoughtful and unbiased manner.
