What’s going on behind the scenes at the CBC?
Today, I’m getting in touch with a special issue of Now You Know. In this one, I want to share an article with you that fits the theme of the newsletter well.
The article, titled “CBC’s Palestine Exception,” was published on June 15 at the Review of Journalism (formerly known as the Ryerson Review of Journalism). The publication focuses almost entirely on media criticism, and this article, by Rahaf Farawi, is from their annual print issue, which is full of in-depth, well-edited and fact checked articles.
I spoke with Rahaf back in October as she was in the initial stages of doing research for this article. Its focus morphed over the following months, and it’s now about the anti-Palestine bias at the CBC, which you’re likely very familiar with. Rahaf’s article is unique in that it contains many interviews with current and former CBC employees offering first-hand experiences of how the bias operates in practice there, across all parts of the network. It’s a really valuable resource to get a deeper understanding of the issue.
The article also contains a short section focusing on what this newsletter is intended to expose: how Israel lobby groups have a direct impact on the sort of media courage we receive. I’m going to quote that entire section below.
A former CBC employee also had experiences in the newsroom that reflected a perceived fear of the pro-Israel lobby and groups like HonestReporting Canada, which describes itself as an ‘independent grass-roots organization promoting fairness and accuracy in Canadian media coverage of Israel and the Middle East,’ claiming more than 45,000 members. On the group’s website, it claims that its efforts are ‘changing the face of the media and reporting of Israel throughout the world.’ In an article headlined ‘Uncovering Canadian Media’s Devastating Pro-Israel Bias,’ Davide Mastracci, the managing editor of Passage, a publication with a left-wing perspective, writes, ‘Essentially, the way the HRC functions is that employees and subscribers scan Canadian media for things they don’t like. Then, HRC staff work to get corrections, retractions, apologies, or the chance to have favourable rebuttals published by leaning on relationships with compliant journalists or using their email list to flood targets with complaints.’
If CBC runs a program featuring Palestinian voices, the backlash comes quickly, says a CBC journalist. ‘It immediately escalates to the highest levels, and they have to deal with it. There is a lot of fear of backlash from the pro-Israel lobby, [especially] people from HonestReporting.’ Complainants first file a report against an episode, a news item, or a show directly with CBC. If they are not satisfied with the management’s response, they can then request a public review from the ombudsman’s office. A recent example of such a complaint resulted in a decision on March 23 from Nagler. It involved an episode of CBC Radio One program Unforked, which invited four guests to discuss the politics of hummus in the context of Israel. The question was, had the dish been appropriated?
The episode, which aired on July 5, 2021, featured host Samira Mohyeddin in conversation with Tracy Michael, a fourth-generation P.E.I.-based Lebanese Canadian; comedian Nour Hadidi; Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian social activist and coauthor of The Gaza Kitchen; and Dafna Hirsch, sociologist at the Open University of Israel. The guests discussed the history of the dish and its connection to local communities over the centuries. Many people who moved to Israel, one guest said, had come from Western or Eastern Europe and had found the taste foreign and unfamiliar at first.
In breaking down the relationship between food and connection to the land, Mohyeddin asked if the association was part of a nation-state building project. The HonestReporting complainant objected, raising a number of issues with the program, each of which is typical of a HonestReporting claim: Jewish indigeneity to Israel had been ignored, the word Nakba was inappropriately used, the episode delegitimized Israel’s existence.
In his report ‘Digesting Gastronationalism,’ Nagler ruled against many of these complaints but ultimately decided that the ‘nation-state project’ language ‘amplified the sense that the program was not balanced.’ He concluded that ‘the real flaw here was the way the program was structured,’ and offered a series of alternative editorial options for how the episode could have been organized. He ultimately found ‘this episode of Unforked violated CBC policy. I hope that programmers will use this as a learning example to understand how the production choices they make can undermine a program which might otherwise have been fine.’
Yet the focus of Mohyeddin’s show was the examination of the intersection of food and politics. The show describes itself on CBC’s site as one that ‘picks apart the food we eat to reveal the culture and politics baked into it….You’ll hear sticky conversations with passionate eaters. Nothing is off the table.’ Prior to Nagler’s report, the journalist told me that the organization’s actions impact newsroom decision making. ‘It’s quite blatantly said, ‘Oh, if we do that, the HonestReporting people are going to come after us’….Not to say that they always necessarily see that as an impediment. But it is clearly on their mind. That notion of do we have the capacity and the resources to, like, deal with that backlash right now? Or maybe we throw in another voice to quote, unquote, balance it out?’
Although Palestinians and human rights groups often respond negatively to the coverage, the same journalist says the organization isn’t as concerned about their reactions. ‘They’re just not feared in the same way, because they don’t have as much power and sway.’”
This section illustrates that while media may not always comply with demands from Israel lobby groups, they do always keep them in mind when they’re planning coverage. In many cases, this means they’ll either avoid doing a story entirely, or, as the passage above notes, water it down in an attempt to avoid hearing from these groups. I also found the mention in this passage of media just simply not caring about what Palestinians think as much to be important. They don’t have as much power as Israel lobby groups, so they aren’t treated with much concern.
Anyways, what I quoted was just a small chunk of the article, and you should read the whole thing. And if you need a refresher on what “HonestReporting Canada” is, you can re-read the second issue of this newsletter, which serves as a short introductory profile.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in touch soon with more to share.
P.S., If you’d like to catch up on some of my past writing on the Israel lobby, pro-Israel media bias, etc., you can check out these articles: Uncovering Canadian Media’s Devastating Pro-Israel Bias; Western Media Doesn’t Want You To Read The Word Palestine; Media Should Stop Referring To Israel’s Military By Its Formal Name; Media Is Ignoring Alleged Illegal Israeli Army Recruitment In Canada; Media Has Whitewashed The Anti-Palestinian Pogroms In Jerusalem; Exposing How Pro-Israel Groups Manufacture Antisemitism Narratives; Gaza Protests Led To More Articles On Antisemitism Than Mass Shooting; Debunking Politicians’ Falsities About The York University Protest; Canadian Media: Cheerleading War on Palestine.