The response of Canada’s legacy news media to the Israeli government’s military action in Gaza for more than 640 days points to a problem within major Canadian news organizations, according to a new Canadian book, When Genocide Wasn’t News.
In the book, journalists — some writing under pseudonyms — say their newsrooms have been severely hampered by a culture of fear and an adherence to a notion of objectivity that no longer serves the public.
Israel’s relentless military actions in the Gaza Strip following the Oct. 7, 2023 attack and taking of 251 hostages by Hamas should be prominently featured news. The Israeli Defence Forces’ illegal attacks on children, hospitals and aid workers should also be making constant headlines. But news coverage on these attacks is scarce or misleading.
I research and teach media, monitor the news and edit an online publication about journalism in Canada. My PhD thesis focused on Latin America and examined how the mandate to be objective can be confusing in times of war. I also explored questions about how journalists understand and apply objectivity in different contexts.
I found journalists who support peace efforts can easily be accused of being “biased” in favour of those promoting peace.
Not all wars covered equally
Not all wars are covered the same. Noureddine Miladi, a media and communications professor at Qatar University, found Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 received far greater coverage in mainstream media than the war in Gaza. Part of this difference in coverage lies in the ability to send reporters to cover events first hand, which is impossible in the Gaza Strip, where outside journalists are banned from entry.
Read more: The chilling effects of trying to report on the Israel-Gaza war
Another major factor affecting coverage is how newsrooms understand and apply their norms, including objectivity. Journalism production is influenced and impacted by the dynamics of place and power that surround it.
As Carleton University journalism professor Duncan McCue argues, an unexamined adherence to objectivity can perpetuate colonial points of view. University of British Columbia journalism professors Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young, authors of a book about journalism’s racial reckoning in Canada, also make this argument.
Accusations of antisemitism
Accusations of bias can have an outsized impact on reporting and be used to silence journalists.
According to some journalists, there is an atmosphere of fear when it comes to reporting on the Middle East in mainstream newsrooms in Canada. Some have self-censored in response to threats.
Not only do journalists say they are facing threats, they also face a context in which governments, such as the province of Ontario, are adhering to definitions of antisemitism that equate it to criticism of Israel.
In Canada, news organizations and individual journalists attempting to report on the violence in the Gaza Strip are being accused of antisemitism by groups such as Honest Reporting, according to the Canada Press Freedom Project. This means almost anyone reporting on the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza will receive hundreds of messages claiming the report is antisemitic.
Since many scholars and the United Nations Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices have called the Israeli government’s methods “consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war,” urgent reporting is needed — and it’s not antisemitism to call out what experts have labelled global injustices.
Left-wing bias?
The culmination of decades of this type of criticism of news media has included a right-wing narrative that accuses media of a liberal bias. The trope of the liberal media as a threat has had a steady hold of the public imagination across North America since the Cold War.
Reporters who focused on stories about human rights, questioned the tactics and budgets of the military industrial complex or challenged the mistreatment of socialist activists as being unpatriotic were accused of having a liberal, left-wing, even communist, slant.
This isn’t a phemomenon limited to North America. Latin American politicians have a long history of using “left-wing bias” labels as a powerful tool to intimidate journalists.
Read more: How news coverage influences countries' emergency aid budgets – new research
What do journalists owe peace?
Research shows that audiences value objective journalism, or reporting that they deem non-partisan and keeps opinions at bay. But consumers also increasingly value journalism that is empathetic and emotionally resonant.
After United States President Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, journalism scholars recognized that a major failure of news coverage during the presidential campaign was not calling things what they were. For example, journalists used euphemisms such as “he misspoke” instead of reporting that Trump was lying, contributing to a crisis of relevance in journalism.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Israel-Gaza war has killed more journalists than in any other conflict it’s documented. But the allegedly deliberate targeting of journalists in Gaza, of whom at least 225 have been killed, has garnered little attention in newsrooms, despite calls by dozens of independent journalists to make the issue more visible.
This is another unprecedented set of events that should be reported on for Canadian audiences.
How will Canadian newsrooms do better? One idea could be that newsrooms join forces to fend off accusations of bias and antisemitism. They could start with reclaiming objectivity as a practice of information-gathering and moving away from objectivity as an ideal of dispassionate reporting.
They could also embrace, instead of fear, journalism’s liberal roots and reclaim journalism from a standpoint of clarity where actions against the rule of law, abuses of power, war profiteering, crimes against humanity — any illiberal acts — clearly fall on the wrong side of the liberal-democratic balance and therefore demand to be denounced. As veteran CBC journalist Carol Off has said, we need to denounce illiberal acts as anti-democratic ideology.
Every inhabitant of Gaza remains in imminent peril today, and the media have a responsibility to inform us about it.
Gabriela Perdomo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
