In a report that was breathtakingly lacking in even the most fundamental journalistic standards, an October 30 broadcast for CityNews saw host Cynthia Mulligan interview Mel Brecknell, a Canadian doctor working in Canada, whom Mulligan disclosed was a “close personal friend.”

The segment, “’Hard to believe in humanity’: Canadian doctor in Gaza on working in a war zone,” saw Mulligan tell viewers about some injured Gazans, citing two teenagers injured under murky circumstances, though it is made clear that Israel is the alleged culprit.

Click below to watch the segment:

No acknowledgement was made about what the two were doing, and why they may have been injured. In the case of one teenager, “shot in the abdomen at a food distribution site,” Mulligan does not claim it was Israel’s fault, but the implication is obvious, even though Palestinian terrorists actively fired upon Palestinians there collecting food, trying to wreak havoc.

Again and again in the broadcast, Mulligan portrays Israel as the villain, showing scenes of ruin, and saying that “after two years of war, there is nothing left but rubble.”

In fact, literally behind her interview subject, Mel Brucknell, are standing buildings with lights and vehicles, despite Mulligan’s selectively-chosen footage. And if there is “nothing left but rubble,” the Gazans who have been posting videos and images to social media showing their new restaurants and other establishments certainly haven’t heard that news yet.

In fact, in one recent video, a group of Gazans record their surprised reactions when seeing that much of Gaza is “as if it is October 6,” in other words, untouched by war.

Mulligan reported that Brucknell was in Gaza working with a “Canadian medical nonprofit” called Glia. But that is far from the full picture. The group’s Canadian medical director is Tarek Loubani, a hardline anti-Israel activist who claims he was shot by Israeli troops in 2018 in circumstances that remain unclear. In previous interviews, he has spread the groundless claim that Israel executes medical staff.

Another of its staff is Benjamin Thomson, listed as a senior medical consultant. Thomson is a nephrologist who was suspended by his employer, Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital in late 2023, just days after Hamas’ massacres in Israel, for appearing to deny the well-chronicled instances of rape and sexual assault in the Palestinian mass killings. Like Loubani, Thomson is a radical anti-Israel activist who signed an open letter in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacres accusing Israel of a non-existent “genocide” and avoiding any mention of Hamas or the Israeli hostages kidnapped.

And the group’s director of development, Dorotea Gucciardo, co-authored a commentary attacking Israel while refusing to mention Hamas a single time.

But rather than show the full picture to viewers so they can see another supposedly humanitarian group that has engaged in strident anti-Israel activism, Glia and Mel Brucknell were given coverage that only a publicist could only dream of.

In Mulligan’s telling of events in Gaza, the coastal enclave is destroyed and teenagers are injured, seemingly at random, and certainly not for any untoward reasons. And Hamas, the genocidal Islamic terrorist group that started the war and perpetuated it for two years, all while weaponizing virtually every square inch of Gaza to ensure maximum civilian casualties in an open strategy that its leaders even boasted about? Nowhere to be seen and entirely censored.

Cynthia Mulligan’s October 30 report for CityNews was not a work of journalism, but a fawning conversation where the host spread false and misleading anti-Israel claims with a representative of a radical anti-Israel group.