Two former Canadian ambassadors to Israel, treated extraordinarily differently by the Canadian news media.

One of them, Jon Allen, has relentlessly attacked the Jewish State, echoing Hamas propaganda and blaming the country for Hamas terrorism. The other, Vivian Bercovici, has been a stalwart supporter of Israel.

Yet only one of them has been regularly quoted in scores of Canadian newspapers and interviewed in radio and television broadcasts, and it should not surprise any observer of the Canadian news media landscape to learn that Jon Allen, who calls for Israel to be sanctioned, is the one given the platform and treated as the go-to expert while Berovici is all but ignored.

Evan Dyer, a senior reporter at CBC News who has been the subject of multiple HonestReporting Canada alerts for his deeply problematic reporting, authored an article on June 16 entitled: “A Canada-Israel rift is widening over UN votes and sanctions,” which extensively quoted Allen as voicing support for the Carney government’s increasingly hostile relationship with Jerusalem.

Dyer quoted Allen as saying that “the relationship (between Canada and Israel) is not in great shape,” adding that “frankly, it shouldn’t be.”

He was further quoted as calling Israel’s condemnation of Canada’s statement threatening sanctions against Jerusalem, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said helped legitimize the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, as “despicable” and “vile.”

As Dyer told readers, “Allen said Israel’s reaction to Canada’s threat of sanctions in May inflamed the situation.” What a remarkable perspective that Dyer lets slip through. Canada’s threat of sanctions against a liberal democratic ally – perhaps unprecedented in modern statecraft – is evidently little more than a blip, but it was Israel’s response which “inflamed the situation.”

While Allen has a right to his own views, as warped by anti-Israel animus as they may be, readers of CBC News are also entitled to a full picture of events. In this article, they were deprived of that.

If readers thought that they would be getting any alternative perspectives aside from Allen’s aggressively hostile anti-Israel views, they would be badly mistaken. In fact, Allen is the only source interviewed in the article, though he noted that Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae, declined an interview. However, given that Rae represents the current Canadian government and its views, he would be unlikely to offer a different perspective.

The total omission of any diverse opinions is a remarkable choice on Dyer’s part, given that he could have chosen any number of other subject matter experts for their insights, including Bercovici, given that she served the exact same role as Allen. Strangely, he chose not to do that.

This pattern is emblematic of much of Dyer’s reporting. Less than three weeks earlier, he penned a news article about Israeli communities in Judea & Samaria (West Bank), where he misrepresented the longstanding Jewish history in these lands and instead portrayed Israel’s presence as an illegal imposition onto Palestinian territory, an editorialization with no evidentiary support.

Evan Dyer’s June 18 article about the Canada-Israel diplomatic relationship, which featured a singular anti-Israel source, did not even pretend to offer balance to readers. That would be a worrying development for any news outlet, particularly for a publicly-funded broadcaster like CBC News.