Canada’s public broadcaster occupies a position unlike that of any other news organization in the country. CBC/Radio-Canada is funded by Canadian taxpayers and operates under a public mandate. Its journalists therefore carry a responsibility that goes beyond simply producing stories. They are entrusted with helping Canadians understand the world accurately, fairly and honestly, particularly when the subject is emotionally charged, politically explosive and capable of affecting the safety of Canadian citizens.
That responsibility became extraordinarily important on October 7, 2023. And that is where CBC failed Canadians.
What happened that day was not another episode in the seemingly endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas launched the deadliest massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. About 1,200 people were murdered, and 251 people were taken hostage. Civilians were deliberately hunted down, tortured, and killed. Families were slaughtered. Women were subjected to sexual violence, including rape and gang rape. Children and elderly people were singled out and murdered. Homes were burned. The attack was planned, coordinated and carried out by Hamas, an organization formally designated as a terrorist entity by the Government of Canada.
Yet as the enormity and savagery of the attack were becoming apparent, Canada’s public broadcaster was preoccupied with something else: whether its journalists should be permitted to call Hamas what it was. On October 7 itself, George Achi, then CBC News’s Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust, sent an email to CBC journalists instructing them not to refer to the Hamas attackers as “terrorists.” Achi wrote that terrorism was “heavily politicized” and instructed journalists, even when quoting governments or other sources using the term, to provide context so audiences would understand that the designation was an opinion rather than a fact. The existence and substance of that directive were subsequently confirmed and debated publicly, including before parliamentary committees. This distinction matters for the historical record: it was George Achi who sent the October 7 directive concerning the use of the word “terrorist.” Brodie Fenlon, CBC News’s editor-in-chief, subsequently defended CBC’s policy and explained why the organization would not itself apply the term “terrorist” to Hamas. Fenlon argued that the policy was longstanding and consistent with the approach of other major news organizations. Fenlon’s claim was a half-truth and, by design, misleading, and context destroys it.
That was not neutrality. It was cognitive dissonance on steroids and a breathtaking collapse of editorial judgment. And it was the moment CBC shot itself in the head.
The phrase is deliberately harsh because the obtuse decision warrants it. A broadcaster does not demonstrate neutrality by pretending established facts are merely matters of opinion. Hamas was not an obscure political organization whose status required a philosophical debate. It was—and remains—a Canadian-designated terrorist organization that had just carried out a mass attack deliberately targeting civilians. CBC could have reported a simple fact: Hamas, which Canada has designated a terrorist organization, had attacked Israel and murdered civilians. Instead, its editorial policy turned the designation itself into a matter of journalistic controversy. It dressed up a question of fact as a debate about neutrality. That decision mattered because language frames reality. Calling Hamas a terrorist organization communicates something fundamental about the nature of the organization and the nature of the attack. Removing that description while subsequently devoting enormous attention to Israeli military actions and Palestinian suffering creates a very different narrative frame. The problem was not that CBC reported Palestinian suffering. It had an obligation to do so. The problem was that from the outset it displayed a willingness to treat the actions and identity of Hamas with extraordinary caution while subjecting Israel to increasingly aggressive scrutiny.
The October 7 directive was not an isolated lapse. It was the first unmistakable signal of an editorial posture that would recur throughout CBC’s coverage. What followed was a sustained pattern of disputed sourcing, inadequate attribution, terminology that softened or blurred responsibility, context stripped to the bone, guest selection that skewed debate, and editorial judgment that repeatedly raised the same uncomfortable question: was CBC reporting the conflict, or increasingly interpreting it through a predetermined narrative?
One of the earliest and most consequential controversies involved the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on October 17, 2023. CBC initially reported that hundreds had been killed in what the headline described as an Israeli airstrike, attributing the claim to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. The story was subsequently changed as evidence emerged that the hospital itself had not been struck and that the explosion was more likely associated with a failed rocket launch. Canada’s Department of National Defence later concluded that Israel was not responsible for the explosion and assessed with high confidence that the blast was caused by a rocket launched from within Gaza.
The lesson should have been obvious: when the evidence is uncertain, a responsible broadcaster must make that uncertainty unmistakable before presenting an allegation to a mass audience. That is precisely where CBC’s coverage became vulnerable. The initial allegation had enormous emotional power. The later correction or qualification did not carry anything remotely comparable. Once an audience has been told that Israel may have bombed a hospital, the correction does not reset the public’s understanding to zero. This is why CBC’s reliance on corrections as evidence that its accountability system is functioning is inadequate. Corrections are necessary, but they are not a substitute for rigorous journalism before publication. The damage occurs at publication.
The same questions arose around CBC reporting concerning Gaza’s water infrastructure and humanitarian conditions, where critics argued that important context about water systems, humanitarian arrangements and competing Israeli and Palestinian claims was insufficiently explained. The issue is not whether CBC occasionally gets something wrong. Every serious news organization does. The issue is whether its errors repeatedly expose the same editorial weakness. When the same problems recur—insufficient attribution, inadequate context, unchallenged allegations, reliance on advocacy-driven sources, and a failure to apply comparable scrutiny to competing claims —the question changes. It is no longer simply whether an individual journalist made a mistake. It becomes a question of the editorial judgment and culture that produced those mistakes. And that is precisely the question CBC has been reluctant to confront.
It is important not to hide behind the word “CBC” as though the institution were some faceless machine. People make editorial decisions. Editors decide what gets assigned. Producers decide which guests receive a microphone. Reporters decide which questions to ask. Senior editors decide what gets emphasized, what gets cut and what gets corrected. Executives defend those decisions.
George Achi therefore matters. He was the CBC executive who issued the October 7 directive concerning the use of the word “terrorist.” The directive was not some anonymous policy document discovered years later. It was an internal message sent to CBC journalists in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s massacre. Parliamentary records subsequently documented the controversy surrounding it. (House of Commons of Canada)
Brodie Fenlon matters too. He was CBC News’s editor-in-chief during the October 7 controversy and subsequently defended the organization’s policy. Fenlon argued that CBC’s approach was consistent with policies used by other major news organizations and that CBC does not itself designate organizations as terrorist entities.
That explanation does not make the decision less troubling. It makes the institutional judgment more troubling. The question is not whether Fenlon personally wrote every controversial CBC story. Obviously, he did not. The question is whether the editor-in-chief recognized the extraordinary editorial danger of treating the identity of Hamas as a matter requiring linguistic neutrality at precisely the moment when Canadians needed factual clarity. He defended the policy instead. CBC’s willingness to stand behind that decision was a clear sign of how deep the problem ran inside Canada’s public broadcaster. Leadership sets the boundaries within which journalists operate. When a newsroom learns that describing Hamas as a terrorist organization is considered too politically loaded, while allegations concerning Israel can be reported with far less hesitation, it receives a signal about where editorial caution is expected and where it is not.
That is how institutional bias develops: not necessarily through explicit declarations of intent, but through thousands of decisions about language, framing, sources, headlines, guests and context. The audience experiences the accumulated result. And that result is fundamentally at odds with what Canadians should expect from a publicly funded national broadcaster.
This is where former CBC journalist Tara Henley’s criticism of modern journalism becomes particularly relevant. Henley argues that objectivity does not mean that journalists pretend to have no personal experiences, beliefs, or biases. It means creating professional systems that prevent those biases from controlling the journalism. Those systems include careful editing, attribution, evidence, disclosure of conflicts, separation of reporting from opinion, meaningful corrections and a willingness to question one’s assumptions.
Those are the guardrails. They exist precisely because journalists are human. The journalist does not need to be without opinions. The newsroom needs to be disciplined enough to prevent those opinions from becoming the invisible architecture of the story. Henley has warned that Canadian journalism has increasingly moved away from traditional notions of objectivity and toward more activist forms of reporting. Her concern is not that journalists should stop caring about injustice. It is that journalism loses its credibility when the reporter begins with a moral or political conclusion and then selects facts accordingly.
That warning is particularly relevant to CBC’s Israel coverage. The question is not whether individual CBC journalists have personal views about Israel, Palestine or Zionism. The question is whether CBC’s editorial systems are strong enough to prevent those views from determining what audiences are told. The accumulated record raises serious reasons to conclude that they are not.
CBC’s interview programming illustrates the problem particularly well. Take As It Happens. In June 2025, the program interviewed Hassan Dbouk, the mayor of Tyre, Lebanon, about tensions involving Israel and Hezbollah. Dbouk repeatedly described Hezbollah as a “resistance” movement. The problem was not that CBC interviewed him. Of course it should interview him. The problem was what CBC did with the interview. Hezbollah is designated as a terrorist organization in Canada. Yet the segment did not sufficiently equip listeners with context about Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, its relationship with Iran or its history of attacks against civilians. A guest is entitled to describe Hezbollah as a resistance organization. A journalist is not entitled to let that political description stand without providing the audience with the information necessary to understand what Hezbollah actually is.
The same problem emerged in CBC’s interview with former U.S. envoy Rob Malley concerning Iran’s regional role. The discussion did not provide adequate context about Iran’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah or the Iranian regime’s record of repression and violence. Again, the issue is not that Malley should not have been interviewed.
The issue is that a platform is not journalism unless the journalist actually interrogates what is being said. A microphone is not journalism. Questions are journalism. Verification is journalism. Context is journalism. When those things disappear, the interview can become little more than a broadcast platform for activism or political messaging. The same problem arises when CBC gives extensive airtime to activists without adequately disclosing their histories, affiliations or advocacy.
CBC contributor Shireen Ahmed is an example of why this matters. Ahmed has a public history of commentary and advocacy concerning Palestinian issues. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Journalists and contributors are entitled to opinions and causes outside their professional work. But when someone appears under the CBC banner, audiences are entitled to know when relevant advocacy or public positions could materially shape the perspective being presented. The issue is not that contributors must be politically neutral human beings. It is transparency. A public broadcaster cannot simultaneously insist that objectivity matters and treat relevant activist histories as though they are irrelevant to the audience’s ability to evaluate what it is hearing.
The same pattern has appeared in CBC’s reporting about people and institutions connected to Hamas-controlled Gaza. Coverage of Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, is one of many examples. CBC reported extensively on his detention and allegations concerning his treatment, while critics argued that Israeli allegations concerning his connections to Hamas were inadequately incorporated into the reporting.
The journalistic obligation in such a situation is not to accept Israeli allegations as fact. It is to report that the allegations exist, identify their source, explain the evidence supporting them and make clear what remains unproven. That is what rigorous conflict journalism looks like. The alternative is to report one side’s narrative as the principal story while treating the other side’s allegations as an inconvenient appendage.
The same problem surfaced in CBC coverage of Gaza-related activism, including its reporting on the 2025 flotilla and interviews with activist Ehab Lotayef on programs including Daybreak Montreal and Day 6. The interviews provided substantial room for the activist perspective, while critics argued that the CBC failed to provide sufficient context on the political objectives of the flotilla, the backgrounds and positions of some participants, and disputed claims concerning its humanitarian purpose.
Once again, the problem is not that an activist was interviewed. The problem is that CBC appeared too willing to accept the activist’s framing rather than interrogate it. A journalist does not have to challenge every sentence a guest utters. But when a guest makes a politically charged or factually consequential claim, the audience needs enough context to understand what it is hearing. That is the basic difference between reporting and amplification.
Since October 7, organizations including Honest Reporting Canada have filed numerous complaints about CBC’s coverage of Israel, Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah and Jewish issues. Some complaints have resulted in corrections, revisions or clarifications. One example involved CBC reporting that described Gaza Health Ministry casualty figures as civilian casualties without making sufficiently clear that the figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. CBC subsequently changed the wording. Another involved CBC reporting about a deadly incident involving humanitarian aid distribution. The CBC Ombudsman found that the wording presented a contested account as established fact rather than appropriately attributing it to its source, and CBC subsequently updated the article.
These cases are important because they demonstrate something CBC’s defenders sometimes overlook: a correction can simultaneously demonstrate that an accountability mechanism worked and that the original journalism failed. Those are not contradictory propositions. If a journalist gets something wrong and later corrects it, the correction is evidence of accountability. The original error remains evidence of a failure in the reporting process. The question is what happens when the same category of failure keeps occurring. At some point, the reasonable response is no longer, “Good thing CBC has an Ombudsman. It becomes: “Why does CBC’s Ombudsman keep having to deal with this?” CBC’s Ombudsman has addressed complaints concerning the use of “terrorist” and CBC’s attribution policy, ultimately concluding that the policy did not breach CBC’s existing Journalistic Standards and Practices. But the fact that a policy survives an internal standards review does not make it wise, persuasive or immune from legitimate public criticism. A policy can comply with an organization’s rules and still expose a profound weakness in those rules.
The criticism has also moved beyond individual complaints. In 2025, HR Canada Charitable Organization published an analysis of 2,789 CBC online articles relating to the Israel-Hamas war between October 2023 and June 2025. The analysis combined artificial-intelligence tools with human review. It concluded that CBC’s coverage placed heavy emphasis on Palestinian civilian experiences while comparatively minimizing Israeli civilian suffering, hostages and Jewish perspectives. It also raised concerns about CBC’s use of a small number of anti-Zionist Jewish organizations as representative Jewish voices while giving less attention to mainstream Jewish institutions. CBC rejected the study’s conclusions.
But dismissing a study does not answer the broader question it raises. Bias is not necessarily visible in a single sentence. It can be created by the cumulative selection of stories, sources, headlines, photographs, experts, terminology and context. Two news organizations can report the same conflict using factually accurate sentences and nevertheless leave their audiences with radically different understandings of what happened. That is why framing matters. The question is not whether every CBC journalist consciously intended to produce a pro-Palestinian narrative. The question is whether the accumulated editorial choices produce one. By any standard, the evidence shows that CBC has a culture of inherent bias when it comes to reporting objectively on Israel, Gaza, Jewish Canadians or anything critical when it comes to the proper framing of the Palestinian narrative. The result of this ongoing bias and false narrative has contributed ot antisemtic violence in Canada and has put Jewish Canadians in clear and present danger in their own country.
There is another reason Canadians should take concerns about CBC’s editorial culture seriously: former CBC journalists themselves have publicly challenged the institution.
Travis Dhanraj, a former CBC journalist and anchor, testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage on March 10, 2026. He alleged that CBC created a “toxic culture” in which intimidation went unchecked and described experiences involving bullying, retaliation, editorial gatekeeping and concerns about political influence. Dhanraj also described concerns about centralized control over political guest bookings and barriers involving Conservative voices. These are allegations, not adjudicated findings, and they should be identified as such. CBC disputes them. But Dhanraj’s testimony cannot simply be dismissed as the sour grapes of a disgruntled former employee. He spent years inside the institution and put his allegations into the public record before a parliamentary committee.
His testimony matters because it raises the same question that emerges from the Israel and antisemitism coverage: what happens when an editorial culture becomes uncomfortable with perspectives that challenge its assumptions? That is a profoundly important question for a public broadcaster. And it becomes even more important when the subject is Israel, Hamas and antisemitism, where ideological assumptions are powerful, and the consequences of bad journalism can extend far beyond the newsroom.
The consequences of the information environment cannot be separated entirely from what is happening outside the media. Canada is experiencing a profound antisemitism crisis. Statistics Canada recorded 788 police-reported hate crimes targeting Jews in 2025, making Jews the second-most targeted group by the number of police-reported hate crimes, behind Black Canadians. Jews accounted for about 71 per cent of religion-motivated hate crimes despite representing roughly one per cent of Canada’s population. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs calculated that a Jewish Canadian was 22 times more likely to be the victim of a hate crime than any other Canadian. (CIJA)But police-reported hate crimes tell only part of the story.
B’nai Brith Canada’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents recorded 6,800 antisemitic incidents in 2025—the highest annual total in the history of its audit, which dates to 1982. That amounted to an average of 18.6 incidents every day and represented a 9.4 per cent increase over 2024 and a 145.6 per cent increase over 2022, before October 7.
And the violence has continued into 2026. In May, B’nai Brith reported that 11 violent antisemitic incidents had already been recorded in the first months of the year—more than the 10 recorded during all of 2025. By July 15, that number had risen to 27, more than double the 2025 total and already higher than the totals for 2022, 2024 and 2025. This is not an abstract argument about media theory. It is happening to Canadian citizens.
CBC did not create antisemitism. It did not create Hamas. It did not cause every act of hatred committed since October 7. Antisemitism has multiple sources, including extremism, conspiracy theories, social media, foreign propaganda, Islamist extremism, far-right movements and longstanding prejudice. But none of that absolves Canada’s national public broadcaster of responsibility for helping create the toxic and patently antisemitic information environment in which this hatred has flourished.
That conclusion is not based on a claim that CBC is responsible for every antisemitic act in Canada. It is based on the far more straightforward proposition that a national public broadcaster has enormous responsibility for how Canadians understand events and people—and that responsibility becomes particularly serious when one community is facing sustained and escalating hatred and violence.
There is nothing inherently antisemitic about criticizing Israel. Israel is a democratic country, and its government, military and policies are legitimate subjects of scrutiny. A serious public broadcaster should investigate allegations of misconduct, examine civilian casualties, question government decisions and hold Israeli leaders accountable. But journalism also has a responsibility to distinguish criticism of a government from hostility toward a people. That distinction becomes particularly important when Jewish Canadians are being targeted for events over which they have no control.
When “Israel” becomes the explanation for everything, when Hamas’s ideology and terrorism disappear into the background, and when Jewish fears about antisemitism are treated principally as political advocacy, the result can be a moral environment in which Jews increasingly become proxies for a foreign conflict. That is dangerous. A broadcaster does not have to explicitly promote hatred to help create conditions in which hatred becomes easier to rationalize. It can do so through framing, omission, repetition and the relentless elevation of one narrative over another.
That is why CBC’s claim that it is simply “reporting the news” has become almost laughable. When a broadcaster repeatedly makes choices about language, sources, framing, omissions and context that push audiences in the same direction, calling the result “just reporting” is not an explanation. It is an evasion.
The real question, then, is not whether CBC is “just reporting.” It is what version of reality CBC is constructing for its audience—and whether Canadians can still trust the broadcaster to tell them the difference between reporting reality and shaping it.
Perhaps the most troubling part of this entire controversy is CBC’s response to criticism. A healthy journalistic institution should welcome scrutiny. Corrections, challenges and public debate are part of the professional ecosystem of journalism. Instead, CBC and some of its journalists have too often reacted to criticism as though the very existence of criticism were evidence that the journalist must be doing something right. That is backwards. It is Journalism 101: being challenged does not make a journalist correct. A journalist’s work is not validated by the amount of outrage it generates. It is validated by its ability to withstand scrutiny.
If Honest Reporting Canada identifies a factual problem in a CBC story, the answer is not to attack Honest Reporting Canada. The answer is to examine the story. If a critic identifies an omission, the answer is not to investigate the critic’s political affiliations. The answer is to ask whether the information should have been included. If a Jewish organization complains that a story misrepresented the Jewish community, the answer is not to assume that the complaint must be an expression of the “Israel lobby.”
The answer is to examine the complaint on its merits. You do not rebut an argument by attacking the person making it. You rebut it with facts. When a newsroom begins to treat accountability as hostility, it becomes increasingly difficult for it to see its own failures. And that is how institutions become intellectually closed—incapable of questioning themselves, correcting their errors, or seeing what has become obvious to everyone outside the institution.
The CBC controversy is ultimately about something larger than Israel. It is about what journalism is for. Traditional journalism was built around a relatively simple proposition: journalists are human beings with biases, but professional standards exist to stop those biases from controlling the news. That is why editors exist. That is why attribution exists. That is why journalists are supposed to distinguish allegation from fact. That is why conflicts of interest are disclosed. That is why sources are challenged. That is why corrections are published. That is why journalists are expected to approach complicated stories with humility.
Tara Henley’s argument is that these safeguards are not outdated relics. They are precisely what journalism needs when public trust is collapsing. Journalism needs a shared set of facts that citizens can debate rather than forcing citizens to navigate competing ideological media ecosystems simply to determine what happened. That is exactly right. CBC has a special obligation to uphold those standards because it is not merely another media company. It is Canada’s national public broadcaster. Canadians fund it. Canadians therefore have the right to demand more than ideological self-confidence masquerading as objectivity.
The responsibility ultimately extends beyond individual reporters. Reporters operate inside systems created by editors, producers, managers and executives. Those systems determine which stories are assigned, which guests are booked, how stories are reviewed, which standards are applied, and how corrections are handled. If repeated editorial failures occur, leadership has an obligation to examine whether those systems are functioning.
George Achi showed a breathtaking bias when he issued the October 7 directive concerning the use of the word “terrorist.” Brodie Fenlon’s defence of the decision shows how deep the rot is at the CBC. He was CBC News’s editor-in-chief during the controversy and became the lead puppeteer defending the odious policy. The reporters and producers responsible for individual stories must be held to account for their own editorial decisions. And CBC’s senior management and board deserve scrutiny because they are ultimately responsible for the institutional culture in which those decisions are made.
The question is not whether every controversial story was deliberately biased. That would be almost impossible to establish and unnecessary. The question is whether CBC’s editorial systems have repeatedly produced coverage that fails to meet the standard Canadians are entitled to expect from a public broadcaster.
CBC’s demonstrated and continuing failure to provide objectivity in its reporting on these matters has contributed to a climate in which Jewish Canadians face heightened hostility and real-world harm. It is a failure so sustained, so predictable and so resistant to correction that the issue is no longer simply the journalism itself. It is the dangerous fiction that CBC’s coverage has been consistently neutral, responsible or worthy of the level of trust Canadians are expected to place in a national public broadcaster. The fact is that CBC has failed Canadians in its reporting on this conflict, and its continuing bias is now a clear and present danger to the safety and security of Jewish Canadians.
The answer is not censorship. It is not political interference. It is not forcing CBC to support Israel. It is not preventing journalists from reporting Palestinian suffering. It is something much more demanding: better journalism.
CBC should commission a genuinely independent review of its coverage of Israel and the Middle East since October 7, 2023. It should publish a transparent accounting of corrections and substantive revisions. It should strengthen disclosure requirements for contributors and guests whose advocacy or institutional affiliations are directly relevant to their commentary. It should restore rigorous standards for attribution and verification and require editors to ask whether competing claims have actually received comparable scrutiny.
Most importantly, CBC needs to restore a culture in which journalists are encouraged to challenge assumptions rather than conform to them. That means bringing back the professional guardrails Henley describes. Curiosity rather than certainty. Evidence rather than narrative. Context rather than omission. Questions rather than amplification. And humility rather than ideological confidence.
Canada’s antisemitism crisis did not begin with CBC. But CBC has helped fuel the environment in which it has flourished. That conclusion does not require claiming that CBC caused every antisemitic attack in Canada. It does not require pretending that Hamas, social media, extremist organizations, foreign propaganda or political movements do not have their own responsibility. It requires acknowledging something much simpler: media institutions shape public understanding. And as Canada’s national public broadcaster, CBC has a special responsibility to Canadians when that understanding begins to affect the safety of a Canadian community.
Since October 7, CBC has repeatedly made deliberate and biased editorial choices that have softened the description of Hamas, elevated activist narratives, repeated or amplified contested allegations, omitted relevant context, provided inadequate scrutiny of some guests and sources, and treated criticism of its journalism defensively rather than as a reason for institutional self-examination. Those choices have consequences.
When Israel is repeatedly presented primarily through the lens of destruction and Palestinian suffering while Hamas’s ideology, terrorism and responsibility are insufficiently emphasized, Canadians receive a distorted picture of the conflict. When Jewish Canadians express fear about antisemitism and their concerns are treated primarily as political claims rather than as the concerns of Canadian citizens facing extraordinary levels of hatred, their experiences are diminished. When activists are allowed to describe terrorist organizations as “resistance” without sufficient journalistic context, the language used to understand terrorism itself becomes blurred. When the perpetrators of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust cannot be straightforwardly described as terrorists by the public broadcaster in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, something has gone profoundly wrong. And when all of this occurs while Jewish Canadians are being targeted at rates wildly disproportionate to their population, the consequences become impossible to dismiss as merely an argument about editorial style.
CBC has contributed to the rise of antisemitism in Canada by contributing to the information environment in which hostility toward Israel and hostility toward Jews can increasingly become intertwined. That is not a claim that CBC alone caused the crisis. It is a claim that CBC bears responsibility for its own contribution to it. And that responsibility is substantial.
CBC’s role in Canadian society is too important to be reduced to an ideological battle. It should be capable of holding Israel accountable without ignoring Hamas. It should report Palestinian suffering without erasing Israeli suffering. It should examine Israeli government policy without adopting activist language. It should interview controversial voices without allowing their claims to pass without scrutiny. It should provide Canadians with enough information to distinguish fact from allegation, advocacy from evidence, and criticism from propaganda. Above all, it should understand that objectivity is not the absence of values. It is the discipline of preventing values from determining the facts. That is what the guardrails are for. CBC abandoned those guardrails precisely when they were most needed.
On October 7, 2023, while the world was confronting the enormity of the Hamas massacre, George Achi’s toxic decision to direct CBC journalists not to call Hamas “terrorists,” and CBC’s editor-in-chief, Brodie Fenlon subsequent puppeteering of the decision, should have resulted in their termination or, at worst, a demotion or a time-out to take a history course or a linguistics course on the meaning or words and why context is important when reporting news. It was an astonishing editorial failure. And instead of treating it as a warning and correcting course, CBC’s board and executive team checked their brains at the door and defended its ‘standards’ and chose a path of repeatedly generating new controversies over sourcing, context, attribution, and balance.
Meanwhile, antisemitism in Canada has reached extraordinary levels. Statistics Canada recorded 788 police-reported hate crimes targeting Jews in 2025, while B’nai Brith Canada’s broader audit recorded a record 6,800 antisemitic incidents. In 2026, B’nai Brith has reported a further escalation in violent incidents, with 27 recorded by July 15—more than double the entire 2025 total.
CBC did not create that hatred. But it has helped create and reinforce the information environment in which that hatred has flourished. That is the uncomfortable conclusion CBC does not want to confront. It is also a conclusion Canadians have a right to confront.
The public broadcaster does not belong to its journalists. It does not belong to its executives. It does not belong to one political constituency or another. It exists to serve Canadians. And Canadians have every right to ask whether the institution they fund is still capable of telling the truth without first deciding what the truth ought to be.
On October 7, 2023, CBC faced one of the clearest moral and factual tests a news organization could possibly face. A terrorist organization had massacred Jews. The victims were murdered because they were Jewish or supported Jewish people. The perpetrators were Hamas. Canada had already designated Hamas a terrorist organization. There was nothing complicated about those facts. Yet CBC complicated them. That decision was not merely a bad choice of words. It revealed an institution so determined to avoid appearing partisan that it lost sight of the difference between neutrality and reality. The broadcaster did not need to protect Israel from criticism. It needed to protect journalism from ideology. It failed.
And Canadians, particularly Jewish Canadians, have been living with the consequences ever since. The answer is not to silence CBC. It is to demand that CBC become worthy of being heard again.
Canadians deserve a national public broadcaster that challenges power, interrogates propaganda, exposes wrongdoing and tells uncomfortable truths regardless of whose political interests are offended. It should be capable of defending Palestinians from injustice without defending Hamas, and capable of holding Israel accountable without making Canadian Jews pay the price for the actions of a foreign government.
That is not too much to ask. It is the minimum Canadians should expect from the institution they fund. CBC has spent years asking Canadians to trust its journalism. It is time for CBC to understand that trust cannot be demanded. It has to be earned.
