Anti-Israel bias in the Canadian news media isn’t just by happenstance; much of it is systematic and by design.
In early June, Google announced that it would be tasking a new organization in Canada, the Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC), with distributing $100 million annually to Canadian news companies as part of its agreement with the federal government.
The CJC was founded in May and Sadia Zaman serves as an independent board director.
While Zaman may not be a household name, she has previously served as the managing director of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), a director at CBC News, and executive director of Women in Film and Television-Toronto. She currently serves as the CEO of Inspirit Foundation, whose mandate is to promote “a more inclusive and pluralist Canada where our differences are valued and engaged.”
Zaman is also, in our view, a shameless demonizer of Israel.
She has abused her position at the Inspirit Foundation to appallingly accuse Israel of “genocide,” and her social media activity is a cornucopia of anti-Israel propaganda.
While Zaman posts very little of her own content, she regularly reposts disinformation from anti-Israel actors throughout her X (Twitter) account. And while it can be said that sharing content does not equal endorsing it, her posts related to the Middle East are overwhelmingly (if not exclusively) anti-Israel, and much of it is beyond the pale.
On January 16, she re-posted an image from one account, which read “Don’t let anyone tell you it started on October 7th 2023,” appearing to explain or rationalize Hamas’ genocidal terrorist attacks on that day.
Three days later, she reposted a Tweet which criticized media reporting of Hamas’ rapes which took place on October 7, disparaging testimonials, saying news coverage “recycles a supposed eyewitness account” from that day.
On January 30, she shared a post which grotesquely compared Israel to Nazi Germany, sharing appallingly dishonest propaganda, claiming that more children were dying daily in Gaza than at Auschwitz, which is not only utterly wrong, but a monstrous claim that compares Nazi Germany’s murder of innocent people with an urban war zone where Hamas uses its own people as human shields, and where numbers of children killed are both entirely unverified, and fail to include Hamas’ use of youth soldiers. Importantly, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policies to the Nazis is antisemitic according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
In recent months, Zaman has shared content which falsely accused Israel of genocide, which has documented alleged Israeli atrocities, baseless claims that Israel targets journalists, and more.
Zaman’s anti-Israel animus on social media also has a local focus.
She has repeatedly posted asinine claims that the Canadian news media has a supposedly anti-Palestinian bias, including CBC News, which continues to refuse to characterize Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Given Zaman’s documented radical anti-Israel views, and her integral and central role in helping to disburse $100 million to Canadian news media outlets, the Canadian public should be extremely concerned about which supposedly worthy news organizations will be favoured, and whether it will be based on merit, or ones which meet her extreme anti-Israel ideology.
