On March 10, HonestReporting Canada Executive Director Mike Fegelman, spoke on Parliament Hill at the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and testified about how CBC News has demonstrated a systemic bias in its coverage of Israel and the Israel-Hamas war since October 7, 2023, prioritizing ideological narratives over fair and factual reporting.

Mike stated that CBC’s coverage has contributed to a surge in antisemitism and attacks against Jewish communities in Canada.

His testimony called on Parliament to address these issue at CBC by introducing stronger oversight and transparency measures, including creating an independent commission to audit bias in our publicly funded media, follow legally defined standards for factual reporting, and mandate that CBC and other publicly funded media publish regular transparency reports detailing editorial decisions, guest selection, and how controversial topics are covered.

Watch the full spoken testimony below:

Read the full submitted testimony below:

March 10, 2026

Mike Fegelman
Executive Director
HonestReporting Canada
Written Testimony: House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage
Study: State of the journalism and media sectors

Good morning,

My name is Mike Fegelman, and I’m the Executive Director of HonestReporting Canada. We’re a non-profit organization that ensures fair and accurate Canadian media coverage of Israel and the Middle East. We started more than 20 years ago, but frankly, the overt media bias over the last 2.5 years has made that era look quaint by comparison.

Just hours after thousands of Palestinian terrorists streamed into Israel on October 7, 2023, carrying out an orgy of murder, rape, torture and kidnappings – our taxpayer-funded broadcaster leapt into action.

In a letter to editorial staff, George Achi, CBC’s former director of journalistic warned journalists not to use the word “terrorists” when referring to Hamas, not to admit that 2005 was the end of Israel’s permanent presence in Gaza – which it was – and even when Canadian officials refer to Hamas as terrorists, Achi wrote that reporters “should add context to ensure the audience understands this is opinion, not fact.” Hamas is, of course, listed as a terrorist organization by the Canadian government.

It soon became clear that for CBC – and for wide swathes of the Canadian media landscape – their role was not to report the facts to the Canadian public, but to use their immense influence in society to promote a narrow, ideological agenda.

Present day, news outlets regurgitate talking points from pro-Palestinian activists and overwhelmingly feature guests with a predictable anti-Israel viewpoint; presenting them as credible, while choosing not to include opposing voices.

When anti-Israel groups sneeze, it achieves wall-to-wall news coverage in Canada. When Amnesty International accuses Israel of “genocide” – going so far as to make up a new definition in order to do so, or when a discredited group of non-experts make such claims – they get widespread media coverage.

Yet, when scholars documented Hamas’ fabricated death tolls or penned a comprehensive report demonstrating that no genocide took place, they were ignored by our media.

The unfounded claims of “genocide” and “starvation” were promoted ad nauseum by our media, and as it became clear that those allegations were false, reporters did not apologize; they simply moved on. Now, like a cat chasing a laser dot on the wall, the worst offenders in anti-Israel media bias, whether CBC, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, or others, appear to take their cues, not from what is newsworthy, but rather what complaints are being made by pro-Palestinian activists.

When experts document the worrying rise of Islamic radicalism in Canada, the presence of Iranian regime officials in our nation or the impact of Qatari dark money in Canadian universities, they are treated as persona non grata. When a Canadian mosque honours Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and glorifies him as a martyr, our journalists ignore this brazen support for terrorism.

Our journalists have a solemn duty to hold the powerful to account, not to act as their water carriers. But that is what they’ve done, promoting hardline anti-Israel disinformation and acting as unpaid publicists for an immense web of extremist actors in Canada.

This media coverage directly contributes to a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes. When Israel is painted as a genocidal and pariah state, and opponents are widely silenced, a target is drawn on the backs of Canadian Jews, who overwhelmingly recognize Israel’s right to exist, a view that is portrayed by extremists as somehow controversial.

The incessant demonization of Israel – and by extension, Jews – has led to an unprecedented attack on the Jewish community, with terrorist rallies now a regular occurrence on Canadian streets and Jewish schools and synagogues shot at, while far too many elected leaders – and law enforcement – choose to ignore this cancer in our midst.

Over the past two years, our media deliberately chose to promote ideology over facts, and in the case of CBC, doing so at the taxpayer’s expense. I could be here for days chronicling the indisputable and disgraceful state in most corners of the news media today, but here are just a few examples:

• On November 12, 2024, CBC host Matt Galloway featured a guest who spread the unfounded “genocide” slur 12 times. Not once was he challenged.
• CBC News continues to use reporters who have expressed radical anti-Israel views. Gaza-based videographer Mohamed el Saife has spread vile and hateful propaganda on social media, while reporter Sara Jabakhanji signed, in 2021, an open letter calling for more pro-Palestinian content in the news media. They both continue to cover the Middle East.
• On September 16, CBC Radio-Canada correspondent Élisa Serret – later suspended – uttered an antisemitic trope on-air when claiming that “the Israelis, in fact the Jews, finance a lot of American politics,” and control a “big machine.”
• On October 16, CBC produced a major documentary for its fifth estate program. The entire focus was casting suspicion on Jewish charities in Canada supporting Israel, while the program has shown no such interest in reports of Islamic charities’ connections to terrorism.
• This is not an exclusively CBC problem. Hasan Jaber, The Globe and Mail’s freelancer in Gaza, previously claimed that Israel was trying to “kill everyone” in Gaza. The newspaper subsequently hired him.
• Yipeng Ge, a practicing physician in Ottawa who has repeatedly glorified Hamas terrorism has been granted countless sympathetic interviews on CBC.
• Tamam, a Palestinian restaurant in Vancouver, has posted content to social media glorifying Hamas’ October 7 massacres. That hasn’t stopped it from getting wall-to-wall sympathetic coverage – all of which has ignored this glorification – including by CTV News in October 2023 and October 2024, Global News in October 2023, The Globe & Mail in November, 2023, CBC in February 2025, Global News in March, 2025, and much more.
• On September 26, 2025, La Presse’s editor-in-chief Stephanie Grammond accused Israel of “colonizing” its own land.
• When Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), a group that has led pro-Hamas demonstrations and which organized a celebration of the October 7 massacres, claimed that Canada was facilitating weapons to Israel, it received fawning coverage from two CityNews reports in August, 2025, and CBC News the previous month.
• In French media, Le Devoir columnist Emilie Nicolas engaged in Jew hatred according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism by comparing the Gaza war to the Holocaust. She also drew a moral equivalence between terrorists in Israeli jails and Israeli civilians kidnapped by Hamas, and even fabricated a quote from the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
• Taxpayer-funded Briarpatch magazine has repeatedly praised terrorism against Israel, saying Gazans “should not be expected to achieve liberation by being ‘peaceful,’” and that “resistance… is the defiant act.”
• The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) accused Israel of deliberately targeting journalists, but said nothing when a study this past December found a majority of so-called journalists in Gaza had connections to Palestinian terrorist groups.
• On February 26, 2026, La Presse produced two articles targeting a pair of Montreal Jewish schools for the alleged crime of hosting Israeli soldiers to speak about their experiences. Instead, simply being a Jewish school doing Jewish activities was labeled as being controversial and scandalous.
• In three separate occasions in May and August, 2025, CBC pop culture host Elamin Abdelmahmoud turned his program into a platform for Israel-bashing, hosting four separate guests attacking Israel. Zero guests were provided who could provide any balance at all.
• On August 5, The Toronto Star Editorial Board called for an arms embargo on Israel, despite likely knowing full well that such steps – taken to their logical conclusion – would render Israel utterly defenceless against the terrorist groups seeking its destruction.

These are a handful of a veritable mountain of such examples over the last two years alone.

When our media acts as stenographers for a regressive and hateful worldview, it’s not reporting the news, but creating it. And when our leaders stay silent, they let it happen.

Our elected leaders must take the lead to remedy this situation. I propose three courses of action:

1. A permanent, independent commission should be created to audit and investigate systemic bias in publicly funded media. This body would examine editorial policies, story framing, and guest selection, and publicly report findings. It should have the authority to recommend corrective actions where ideological or political bias is detected.
   

2. Parliament should require CBC and other taxpayer-funded media to follow legally defined standards for factual reporting, particularly on issues of terrorism, security, and international conflicts. Any breach of these standards must trigger formal investigations and be reported publicly to ensure accountability to Canadian taxpayers.
   

3. Mandate that CBC and other publicly funded media publish regular transparency reports detailing editorial decisions, guest selection, and how controversial topics are covered. These reports should include explanations for why certain perspectives are included or excluded and be submitted to Parliament for review, ensuring that taxpayers can clearly see how public funds are used to inform Canadians.

Lastly, I have brought with me today two colleagues – Haran Shani-Narkiss, the CEO of innohives, and Amanda Eskenasi, the Director of Education for HR Canada Charitable Organization. They conducted a comprehensive review of the CBC’s coverage on the Israel-Hamas war, and have provided real, scientific evidence of asymmetric coverage. It isn’t an opinion that the CBC is one-sided, we now have scientific, irrefutable proof.

Canadian taxpayers fund public broadcasters to provide accurate, impartial, and reliable information. When media outlets choose ideology over facts, they fail in this fundamental duty, leaving Canadians misinformed on issues of national security, terrorism, and international conflict. This is not merely a concern for one community; it affects every Canadian’s right to understand the world as it truly is.

Restoring trust in our media is not a partisan cause, but a national imperative. Parliament must act now to ensure that our media serves Canadians with facts, fairness, and integrity, because an informed public depends on it, and our democracy requires it.

Thank you.