We are pleased to report that CTV News has acknowledged incorrectly reporting several times in January that Tel Aviv was Israel’s capital city.

During the course of reporting on the winter storms taking a toll across the Middle East and in Israel in particular, CTV committed a capital offense by claiming that Tel Aviv was Israel’s capital, not Jerusalem. At various times and on several regional CTV stations on January 8, CTV reported that: “… Tel Aviv is dealing with a heavy rain situation. The storms flooded roads and brought chaos to the Israeli capital…”

Responding to complaints by HonestReporting Canada and its members, CTV News President Wendy Freeman issued the following statement: “Tel Aviv was incorrectly reported as the capital city of Israel earlier this month. CTV News immediately took measures to ensure the correct information was being reported as the story progressed.”

As we noted in our alert: “Jerusalem was designated as Israel’s capital in 1950 and while most countries, including Canada, locate their embassies in Tel Aviv due to the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, claiming that Israel’s financial centre is its capital, only serves to deligitimize Israel’s own assigned capital, Jerusalem and to promote a falsehood. Indeed, Jerusalem has been unified for 46 years and has been Jewish for over 3,000 years.”

While we are appreciative that CTV acknowledged it was incorrect to refer to Tel Aviv as being Israel’s capital city, CTV’s failure to issue an unequivocal on-air correction as required by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council’s (CBSC) Code of Ethics was most unfortunate.

Notwithstanding, we thank all HRC letter writers for communicating their concerns directly with CTV News. Importantly, CTV News has set an important precedent in acknowledging that Tel Aviv is not Israel’s capital city, a benchmark that would not have been possible without the individual and collective efforts of HRC’s members.