There’s criticism of Israel, and then there’s what appears to be what can be best described as Israel derangement syndrome, on display at Front Burner, one of CBC’s podcasts.

Front Burner has devoted much of its attention over the last 2.5 years, since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel, to incessantly platforming a particular worldview where pro-Palestinian apologists are normalized, and Israeli voices are largely erased.

In recent days, as the war with Iran loomed (and then began), host Jayme Poisson turned up the heat, devoting nine separate segments to the topic of Iran. While such a focus is not problematic in itself, her narrow perspective provided to listeners was an example, not of journalism, but of overt ideological advocacy.

On February 27, Poisson interviewed Foreign Minister Anita Anand, part of which focused on Iran, and which featured the host pressing Anand as to whether Ottawa supports regime change in Iran, implying it was a scandalous question, and avoiding any mention as to why the Iranian regime, with its atrocious human rights abuses and support for terrorism, is a danger.

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The next episode, broadcast March 2, featured Poisson speaking with Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University. The clear narrative pushed by Poisson was that the Iranian regime was hardly a threat, quoting the Omani foreign minister as claiming that Iran would never possess nuclear weapons. However, Israel has been clear that the nuclear program was one threat among many, including its support for terrorist proxies and its ballistic missile stockpile, both of which received only a passing acknowledgement. The implication, clear to listeners, would have been that the Iranian regime was little threat to anyone.

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The next day, Poisson discussed Iran again, this time with Nader Hashemi, an associate professor of Islamic politics at Georgetown University, and a regular CBC guest whose anti-Israel diatribes are rarely challenged by hosts.

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While the focus was ostensibly about Iran’s modern history, unsurprisingly Hashemi used his sympathetic platform to assail Israel, spreading the “genocide” libel, and claim that US President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement at the behest of “Netanyahu and pro-Israel forces in the United States.”

In our view, Hashemi’s tacit conspiracy theories – which claims that the world’s Jews, who present one-fifth of a percent of the world’s population, could force the hand of the world’s most powerful man – went characteristically unchallenged by Poisson.

And again the next day, Poisson discussed Iran with guest Dennis Horak, former Canadian envoy to Iran. Throughout the interview, Poisson repeatedly framed questions about the war with Iran, not about Tehran’s threats to global peace and order – or even its internal massacres of Iranian protesters – but about the legality and motivations of Israel & the United States.

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Poisson paraphrased commentators who claimed the Iran strikes “is essentially a support of Trump’s brand of imperialism,” while Horak – though he acknowledged Iran’s nefarious acts in the Middle East – dismissed any imminent risk from the regime. While he is entitled to his views, he can and should have been pressed on the rapid rebuilding of Iran’s weapons systems, and that of Hezbollah in Iran, a proxy of the regime.

On March 5, Poisson spoke with University of Chicago professor Robert Pape for his opinions on the war. Pape claimed that strikes on Iranian regime targets would “fuse the society and the regime closer together.” While his ‘rally around the flag’ theory may appear logical in theory, extensive evidence has arisen, both inside Iran and in the Iranian Diaspora, showing precisely the opposite, with Iranians cheering the strikes. Predictably, there was no mention of that, and instead presented the war with Iran as walking into a “trap,” sharing a uniform view offered by Jayme Poisson, and failing to deviate from that narrative.

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On March 6, Poisson discussed the role of AI in the war against the Iranian regime, interviewing Heidy Khlaaf of the AI Now Institute. While there are many AI experts who could have been interviewed, a cursory look at Khlaaf’s social media offers some insight as to why she was specifically selected as a guest, with post after post spreading anti-Israel content, including from the Al Jazeera propaganda outlet.

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True to form, Khlaaf spent the interview portraying the use of AI tools as “just a high-tech version of carpet bombing,” repeatedly casting aspersions, not on the Iranian regime, but on the parties seeking to weaken that regime.

Then on March 7, Poisson was back, speaking with The Economist’s Middle East correspondent, Gregg Carlstrom, who, in a recent interview on Front Burner, repeated criticisms of Israel without critical context. He described the United States as being “bogged down” in the Iran war, despite it being some 10 days old, hardly an accurate term for such a period.

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On March 10, she spoke to one “man on the ground in Tehran” for his supposedly unadulterated views. Beyond the obvious point that speaking from Iran poses obvious security concerns for speaking out against the regime, Poisson’s guest did no such thing, repeating regime talking points, calling Iran’s threat “a load of crap.” Poisson could have sought to speak to someone who could have offered their opposition to the regime, but instead presented a regime apologist.

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The next day, she interviewed Jim Krane from Rice University in Texas, where rather than focusing on Iran’s threats to global oil production and stability, she repeatedly implied that the goal of the war was for Israel and the United States to seize Iranian oil.

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Jayme Poisson’s Front Burner podcast featured nine segments about the war with Iran, with the overwhelming focus being the alleged failings, crimes and miscalculations of Israel and the United States, and featuring a number of guests with well-documented anti-Israel agendas. Yet again, Front Burner is showing itself, not to be a thoughtful discussion of current events, but a disseminator of a narrow ideological agenda, paid for by the Canadian taxpayer.