Two new reports say the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation significantly favours Palestinian perspectives in its reporting on the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
CBC headlines were three times more likely to be sympathetic toward Palestinians than Israelis, researchers found. Palestinian civilians were also more likely to be interviewed than Israeli civilians.
The reports were commissioned by HR Canada Charitable Organization, the charitable arm of Honest Reporting Canada, a Canadian charity that focuses on monitoring media for antisemitism and anti-Israel bias.
HR Canada Charitable Organization has long raised concerns that the CBC is biased against Israel, says Amanda Eskenasi, the organization’s director of education. These reports provide data to back up their claims.
“I want to see [CBC] take it seriously and try to understand why this is happening and to fix it.”
But others say these studies spread misinformation, designed to cause readers to doubt the truthfulness of reports about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
“This is an intentional piece of misinformation,” said Gabriela Perdomo Paez, a journalism professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary who studies objectivity in journalism.
“This is not [a] rigorous study on bias in reporting by our national broadcaster. What it is, is a piece that intends to muddy the waters and make people doubt whether the CBC is fair or not.”
‘Sympathy ratio’
The reports examined CBC’s online coverage of the war in Gaza between Oct. 7, 2023 and June 7, 2025. They looked at just over 2,700 articles.
The analysis in the first report was done by Innohives, a U.K.-based company that uses artificial intelligence to conduct media analyses. It recently studied the BBC’s coverage in a similar way.
Innohives used AI to analyze whether articles expressed sympathy toward Israel, Israel’s army, Israeli citizens, Hamas, Gaza and Palestinian citizens. It conducted the same analysis of the articles’ headlines.
The findings were used to create a “sympathy ratio”: the number of articles and headlines that are sympathetic to Israel versus Palestinians.
The report says sympathy, for its purposes, refers to how language, tone and framing convey emotional emotions or emphasize certain narratives.
Innohives’ analysis found that articles were twice as likely to be sympathetic to Gaza than Israel. Just over a quarter of articles were found to express sympathy for both Israel and Gaza.
CBC’s headlines were three times more likely to be sympathetic toward Gaza than Israel. Only one per cent of headlines expressed sympathy toward both Israel and Gaza.
“The picture that’s depicted by the headlines and the picture that’s depicted by the main text is very, very different,” said Haran Shani-Narkiss, CEO and founder of Innohives.
This matters because readers often only read the headlines, he says. Headlines are often not written by the reporters and could reflect the emphasis of the editors, he added.
In the second report, Eskenasi analyzed the way articles were written, including which sources were quoted and whose stories received more focus.
“The objective was … to understand how narrative choices shape empathy, moral perception, and public understanding,” the second study says.
Eskenasi’s analysis found CBC articles were more likely to quote Palestinian civilians and describe their lives in more detail than Israeli civilians.
“What happened in Gaza and what happened to the Palestinian people was arguably a tragedy, we can say that,” Eskenasi said.
“But also what happened in Israel was also tragic, and we don’t see that in the CBC coverage. It’s a very one-sided telling of what’s going on.”
‘Zero sense’
But Perdomo Paez at Mount Royal University says the AI analysis used in the first report is “dubious.”
An AI tool cannot determine an article’s tone, she says.
She also questioned assessing articles for sympathy toward the Israeli army, particularly when international reports have concluded Israel is committing a genocide on the Palestinian people.
It makes “zero sense” to tell journalists who see atrocities to give everyone equal coverage, she said. Journalists do not need to give an army the same amount of attention as they give civilians, she says.
Often, people are taught that for journalists to be objective, they must be neutral, she says. But those assumptions make it hard for journalists to report on abuses of power when they see them.
In her view, research that relied on interviews with journalists and observations of newsrooms would be more robust.
Perdomo Paez also expressed concern about the work of Honest Reporting Canada, noting reports from journalists who claim the organization harassed them.
In October 2024, pro-Palestinian advocacy groups asked the Canada Revenue Agency to investigate Honest Reporting Canada.
Eskenasi told Canadian Affairs that the CRA’s review of Honest Reporting Canada is not connected to HR Canada Charitable Organization. The two organizations are separate but affiliated organizations, she says.
‘Inherent difficulty’
In a statement to Canadians Affairs, CBC defended its coverage of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
“Rather than comment on a third party’s assessment of our work, we invite Canadians to take a look for themselves at the breadth, depth and rigour of our reporting about the ongoing conflict in Gaza,” wrote Chuck Thompson, head of public affairs at the CBC.
The CBC regularly hears complaints from those who think its coverage favours Israel and from those who think it favours Palestine. Sometimes, one article will generate two opposite complaints.
“To us, this highlights the inherent difficulty of reporting on a conflict in which two deeply rooted narratives are in constant friction,” Thompson wrote in his statement.
Eskenasi said that it matters to all Canadians if the public broadcaster’s reporting lives up to its own standards for reporting on war and conflict.
“At best, there are serious questions about whether they’re meeting their mandate.”
Correction, January 19, 2026 10:27 am: A previous version of this article incorrectly spelled Gabriela Perdomo Paez's last name. We regret the error.
I should hope the CBC favors Palestine, this Genocide has been news for awhile.
No person with any heart would think that the murder of children and women and the theft pf their property has any moral or ethical grounds. The CBC being an independent press has been too silent about these atrocities.
I no longer trust the CBC as a reliable source of information. While I too support Palestine, journalism needs to provide a perspective as unbiased as humanly possible. The CBC gave up nonpartisan reporting years ago. A great example is what is currently going on in the US. The first item on the CBC’s agenda is reporting on the Felon and his activities. But until recently, did we hear from grassroots movements in opposition? Even the NoKings rallies was only minimally mentioned. It’s a real shame; with a country the size of Canada and so sparsely populated, we need a reliable, unbiased source of news. But here we all are, scrambling for traction as we ferret through independent news sources.
I would worry if the CBC didn’t favour the Palestinians in Gaza, since Israel has spent the last few years killing tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children, and given their west bank settlers a free hand to murder Palestinians in their neighbourhood. And I think you will find, the same sympathetic coverage at Global and CTV for obvious reasons. Journalists are people, and they don’t like seeing people massacred. Just as the coverage of Israel was sympathetic for at least a year after Oct. 7. In general, sympathy is associated with the victim, not the agressor.
For me a simple analysis of the death toll on both sides cuts thru the conversation about bais and tone of reporting on the conflict. It is clear that the approximately 70 thousand dead Palestinians defines the situation.