Founded in 2007, J-Source is a Canadian journalism outlet run through Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and Carleton University’s respective journalism programs. It covers a broad range of media, policy, and news topics, but its reporting on Israel, Jewish issues, and the Middle East was relatively limited before October 7, 2023. This changed after Hamas’ massacres in southern Israel, and the subsequent war against Hamas in Gaza.

However, since then and in our estimation, the outlet has become consistently fixated on Israel, producing not only what we regard as deeply problematic content, but what we consider constitutes a dangerous demonization of supporters of Israel.

The issue is not that a journalism outlet investigates difficult questions about war coverage, media bias, or underrepresented communities. Those are legitimate areas of journalistic inquiry. The concern is that J-Source’s coverage, in our opinion, has repeatedly advanced a singular interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically one that frames Israel as the primary source of harm, portrays Palestinian actions primarily through the lens of historical grievance, and challenges journalistic principles such as neutrality, balance, and objectivity when they appear to conflict with that framework.

For an organization connected to two major Canadian journalism schools, this raises a broader question, namely: is J-Source analyzing journalism, or simply laundering pro-Palestinian advocacy?

Some Context and a Pointed Deep Dive:

In 2019, J-Source formed a relationship with J-Schools Canada/Écoles-J Canada (which represents post-secondary journalism programs across Canada). Beyond publishing journalism, J-Source also runs the Canada Press Freedom Project (CPFP). Since 2023, CPFP has been compiling an archive on HonestReporting Canada that J-Source shared widely, with CPFP falsely describing HRC as “weaponizing antisemitism to shut down reporting critical of Israel.”

J-Source later published an investigative article about HonestReporting Canada, referring to it on BlueSky and accusing it of “weaponizing antisemitism and trying to poison journalistic standards on covering Palestine.”

The concern is not merely that J-Source has criticized a media watchdog organization. Journalism organizations routinely scrutinize advocacy groups. Rather, the issue is the apparent asymmetry in J-Source’s approach: while HRC’s criticism of media coverage is examined as potentially harmful to journalism, far less scrutiny is applied to advocacy-oriented language and assumptions within J-Source’s own coverage.

Editor-in-chief Gabriela Perdomo’s social media platforms repeatedly amplify claims framing Israel as the primary agent of harm, including demonizing Zionism, accusations that Israel wants endless war, forcibly starving & committing genocide in Gaza, often in terms evoking the Holocaust. She has also amplified claims by or support for UN official Francesca Albanese, who has been widely condemned for antisemitism, Owen Jones, and Naomi Klein. Altogether, Perdomo’s social media demonstrates in our vantage point a recurring emphasis on Israeli agency and culpability, often presenting the Arab-Israeli conflict through a largely one-sided, black-and-white frame centered solely on Israel’s conduct.

While Perdomo’s social media activity does not necessarily determine an outlet’s editorial position, the editor-in-chief’s public commentary provides relevant context for understanding the broader framing reflected in J-Source’s coverage.

Under Perdomo, J-Source has published various articles that contend with aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. HonestReporting Canada’s review of the published content revealed a threefold motif in coverage: 1) Allegations of underrepresentation of Palestinians and their narratives, 2) Objectivity as a false constraint, and 3) Language choice as political force.

Taken together, however, these reveal a consistent editorial framework: one in which Palestinian narratives are presented as corrective truth, while Israeli narratives and claims are more often approached through skepticism. Ironically, what is presented as criticism of journalistic coverage actually becomes a consistent pattern of uncritically platforming pro-Palestinian narratives as the primary way to understand current events.

Underrepresentation of Palestinians and Palestinian Narratives:

Published on December 23, 2023, “Canadian Newsrooms Are Stifling Palestinian Perspectives” by journalism instructor Shenaz Kermalli, features an interview with president of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA), Dania Majid, who posits that anti-Palestinian racism is a motive for the deliberate lack of coverage of Palestinians, especially coverage that provides “context.”

Pacinthe Mattar, whose presence in media has been repeatedly highlighted by HRC alerts, wrote another J-Source piece on “Moving Past the Palestine Exception,” expanding on this concept. Mattar refers to it as a “general unwritten rule” of “the Palestine Exception,” wherein “no topic was off the table – until [her] journalism focused on the actions of the Israeli government and military, especially as recounted by a Palestinian.”

Imam Kassam published “Beyond the Famine Frame,” taking the belief of the “Palestine Exception” and applying it to the “man-made famine” in Gaza. Another article by Kermalli, further discussed below, emphasizes a Palestinian journalist’s position on the importance of “journalists [spending] more time understanding the history of the region before focusing on current events.”

Objectivity can be a Constraint:

Perdomo published a commentary, “Flawed Notions of Objectivity are Hampering Canadian Newsrooms When It Comes to Gaza” on August 8, 2025, published earlier in The Conversation. Perdomo criticizes journalistic practices around the Israel-Hamas war, suggesting that Canadian newsrooms could do better by “reclaiming objectivity as a practice of information-gathering and moving away from objectivity as an ideal of dispassionate reporting.”

Mattar, in her article, asks the question: “How can we remain objective and neutral about the fact that journalists were being killed while doing their jobs – or sleeping at home with their families?” Kassam refers to the concept, or “solution” of balance as “false.”

Language is Political:

In “If Killing Journalists is a War Crime, Why Isn’t Anyone Stopping It?”, Samia Madwar (interviewing Sonya Fatah, former editor-in-chief and current member of J-Source’s editorial board) describes the killing of journalists is part of “Israel’s genocidal retaliation against Palestinians in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the taking of hostages.”

Kermalli’s aforementioned “From Interviewing Arafat to Fending Off Israeli Settlers, Walid Batrawi Reflects on a Lifetime Reporting From Palestine” opens with detailing the “footage” on Batrawi’s phone “since October 7, 2023, the day Hamas gunmen infiltrated Israeli communities outside the Gaza Strip last year.” This detached description is juxtaposed with an extensive description of “grisly and relentless” images across Gaza.

In Mattar’s aforementioned article, she makes the same point more explicitly: “Palestinians do occasionally make it in the media in Canada, they are often…prevented from sharing crucial context: the Nakba, Israel’s illegal occupation, invasion, annexation and siege of their lands [emp. added].”

Language is political in these pieces, and J-Source contributors use it unevenly. From our perspective, in Madwar and Kermalli’s articles, Hamas’s October 7 attack is described in flat, dismissive language, but all of these examples detail Palestinian history and suffering through much more politically charged, emotional language: the Nakba, occupation, siege, displacement, etc.

Mattar later makes that explicit, calling the “root cause of the conflict” 75 years of “occupation” beginning with “the Nakba in 1948 during which 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their land [emp. added].”

That is the key point: language choice does not just add Palestinian context, it elevates a specific historical interpretation as the explanatory baseline.

Constructing the Bigger Picture:

Riley Sparks wrote the article about HRC as a “Targeted Harassment Machine” for J-Source, explaining that our work allegedly targets media “that is not entirely in line with current Israeli government policy, or that acknowledges the existence of Palestinians at all.”

J-Source’s coverage simultaneously argues that Canadian media must acknowledge the Palestinian narrative using politically weighted language that acknowledges what they view as crucial context, but it goes further than that.

On September 27, 2024, J-Source republished an article by David Gray-Donald that was originally published in The Grind, “Global News and PostMedia Refuse to Correct Oct. 7 Falsehoods.” Gray-Donald analyzed the way the claim about 40 beheaded/dead babies on October 7, 2023 was disseminated and maintained across media.

The problem lies not in the investigation itself, but rather in the bigger picture of selectivity and scrutiny, and how in our view, J-Source contributors treat Israeli claims and actions, versus Palestinian ones.

Gray-Donald quotes Sonya Fatah (the interviewee in an aforementioned article) who alleges that “the Canadian education system, Holocaust memory, and Canadian foreign policy…prevents us from challenging” matters related to Israel. But the other side of the coin is decidedly ignored; whether it is accusations of intentionally killed journalists, genocide, man-made starvation, and so forth, the possibility of Palestinian – or even Hamas – culpability is not a concern.

In Kermalli’s first article, ACLA’s Majid argues that editors withhold “the Nakba…occupation …the siege” and other context, and says that “all that context would help the public understand what’s happening.” Which is to say: Israel’s actions explain Palestinians’ response, or Israel’s power over and oppression of Palestinians explains Palestinian violence.

That same article offers the perspective that “contextualizing is often misinterpreted as offering justification for Hamas’s actions against Israel…But offering a background story ‘isn’t justifying and it isn’t condoning’.”

Conversely, in her conversation with Samia Madwar, Sonya Fatah responds to accusations about Palestinian journalists being “militants”: “[T]o not be able to understand both the history of this region and also how organizations come up to resist colonialism. After all we talk about telling truth to power, it’s not hard to understand movements like Hamas and Hezbollah in the context of their births decades after the Nakba [emp. added].”

Pieced together, J-Source’s coverage in our view does not simply prioritize Palestinian narratives, contexts and rhetoric; it consistently elevates a particular pro-Palestinian interpretive frame as journalistic common sense, as objectivity.

Across J-Source coverage and from our perspective, Israeli narratives, claims, and history are treated as the central driver of conflict; Palestinians’ position in the wider narrative is folded into broader, politically-driven explanations of history, structural issues, and motivations. The result is a recurring asymmetry in J-Source’s editorial posture, one that is not merely sympathy toward Palestinians, but rather a predetermined narrative of morality and victimhood.

The concern with J-Source is not that it examines Israel, publishes Palestinian perspectives, or challenges established narratives. The concern in our view is that a publication connected to Canadian journalism education appears to repeatedly blur the distinction between analyzing bias and advancing a particular pro-Palestinian agenda.

When a platform associated with journalism education presents what we regard as a pro-Palestinian worldview as the natural standard of objectivity, it risks shaping the next generation of journalists toward advocacy rather than serious and honest inquiry.