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 Perdoma 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 whethe rarticles 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 Perdoma 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.
Perdoma 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.”
