Twice within a 24-hour span, CBC misled the Canadian public about the nature of a recent Israeli counterterrorism operation in the Gaza Strip.

A September 10 CBC News television segment entitled: “Israel strikes Gaza ‘safe zone,’ says it was targeting senior Hamas militants” and a CBC Radio World Tonight report provided two back-to-back examples of how CBC invoked fallacies when it comes to covering this conflict, all by reporter Chris Brown who has a history of anti-Israel bias in our view.

Click below to watch the full segment:

Both pieces were guilty of emphasizing the impact of the situation on Palestinians, while downplaying or ignoring the impact of the very same situation on Israelis. Both were guilty of de facto treating the democratic state of Israel as if its credibility is somehow deserving of suspicion, while giving the vicious, totalitarian terrorist organization Hamas the undeserved benefit of the doubt.

The segments in question focused on an incident in which the Israeli military attacked what it described as “senior” Hamas terrorists and leaders who chose to hide, operate, and carry out their war from within a ‘safe zone’ set up by Israel in order to try and allow Palestinian civilians an opportunity to escape the dangers of the fighting.

The accurate way to report on such an incident would be to call out the shockingly heinous and cynical behavior of Hamas embedding its fighters behind helpless refugees and using them as human shields to cover themselves while waging a murderous war against another nation.

In the radio segment, CBC Anchor Susan Bonner teased the report earlier in the program by saying outright that: “An Israeli missile strike right in a humanitarian zone leaves at least 19 people dead and scores more injured.”

Click below to listen to the clip:

Bonner then introduced the report by saying: “In Gaza, Palestinian officials say children are among the dead after Israeli missiles slammed into what was supposed to be a safe zone. It happened early this morning, the exact death toll is unclear. The Gaza Health Ministry says 19 bodies were taken to hospitals. Chris Brown reports on the reaction and why Israel’s military says it carried out this strike.”

Click below to listen to the full radio segment:

It’s noteworthy that CBC initially reported as fact that Israeli strikes left 19 Palestinians dead and then later attributed these claims to “Palestinian officials” and the “Gaza Health Ministry,” AKA Hamas. CBC said definitively that 19 are dead due to air strikes and then said the “exact death toll is u clear”.

CBC Anchor Susan Bonner opened the segment with emotionally charged language like “Israeli missiles slammed into what was supposed to be a safe zone,” showing no sympathy, perspective, or recognition of the fact that targeting these murderous terrorist leaders is necessary in order to prevent further attacks and massacres against the Israeli civilian population — not to mention creating a strong bias before the full facts were explained.

In Chris Brown’s news segment, he chose to introduce the incident as Israel “blasting three huge craters in the middle of an encampment of tents jammed together near a Gaza beach.” He also editorialized numerous times, calling the strike “horrific” and stating that it “obliterated everything” in its path. From here, he went directly into an interview with a twelve-year old child, describing her sad experience of the event which included losing loved ones.

Only after all this, already halfway through the segment, did Brown belatedly mention that there was anything more to the strike than wanton bloodlust for random children and refugees. He passingly acknowledged that Israel’s stated target was “three senior Hamas militants [who had] established a headquarters there” and that they were targeted with “precise munitions” — though he made sure to qualify this last point by noting that ‘precise munitions’ was merely “what [the Israeli spokesperson] called” them.

Immediately after this brief interlude of reality, he went straight back to piling on the anti-Israel narrative. He shared Hamas’ statement on the incident, drawing a moral equivalence between their credibility and Israel’s, and mentioned nothing about Hamas’ known decades-long history as an authoritarian regime who systematically lie and manipulate information for propaganda purposes. He cited Hamas casualty figures, both regarding this incident and regarding the conflict in general, without ever acknowledging that these numbers have been credibly disputed by both Israel and by statisticians, data experts, and others who have reviewed the evidence.

For the final portion of the segment, Brown spoke about other, unrelated anti-Israel controversies, such as the accidental killing of a Turkish-American activist who participated in a “West Bank” protest that coincided with clashes between terrorists and Israeli troops, and criticisms by various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) regarding the aid situation in Gaza.

It’s unclear what either of these has to do with the targeted killing of Hamas leaders. Despite Israel consistently facilitating the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza — including the recent overwhelmingly successful distribution of polio vaccines to Palestinians — he entertained the suggestion that Israel isn’t doing enough to “prioritiz[e] the safety of civilians.” He had nothing whatsoever to say about whether Hamas is prioritizing the safety of civilians, even as he related a story about their leaders hiding in a refugee zone. If his goal was merely to provide some broader context on the current state of the conflict, why didn’t he mention the constant attacks on northern Israeli towns this week?

Whatever his motivation, this is now a consistent pattern from Brown. Whether it’s platforming baseless conspiracy theories, failing to scrutinize Hamas propaganda, or omitting relevant information, few have so vastly missed the mark on so many occasions as Brown has. His journalism has even led to retractions following previous critiques by HonestReporting Canada.

There is no excuse for playing games with the sorrows of the people affected by this conflict — regardless of which side they are on. In our view, twisting news stories to build a political narrative is reprehensible, and far beneath the standards that Canadian taxpayers expect from their national broadcaster.