This summer I lodged a complaint with the CBC regarding their biased coverage of the Middle East. Here is the review of my complaint by Esther Enkin, the ombudsman. Below is my response to her review which I found unacceptable. Please read the documents and if you agree that there is bias, please contact the names I have left at the end of the article.
Good Afternoon, Madame Ombudsman,
Thank you for your review and posting it on-line.
“We are Canada’s national public news and information service. We are rooted in every region of the country and report on Canada and the world to provide a Canadian perspective on international news and current affairs.”
My concern is your definition of the Canadian perspective. You are financed by all Canadians across the political spectrum, yet you are firmly rooted in left wing ideology.
Canada has a long and sad history of anti-semitism. I am sure you are aware of the seminal book “None is Too Many” written by Irving Abella. I am sure you are also aware that it wasn't that long ago that signs were up in Toronto-No Jews or dogs. And I am also sure that you are aware that The Granite Club only recently removed the ban against the admission of Jews to their hallowed halls.
Anti-semitism lingers just below the surface of Canadian society, easily engaged, yet I have heard no call for a discussion on naming anti-Semitism, calling it out to defeat it as I heard the morning of Tuesday, October 14, with Matt Galloway that we need to call out racism.
Last year Elias Hazineh past President of Palestine House, stood at the edge of Queen's Park and said 'Kill the Jews" in Jerusalem.
Where was the CBC, the voice of Canada, funded by Canadians? And this year, in Calgary when feelings were running high and peaceful protestors defending Israel were attacked, women were thrown to the ground and beaten, where was your outrage, your concern for overt anti-semitism in Canada?
And where has the CBC been when Jewish students are attacked on campus to the point that they fear for their lives-in Windsor, at York, Calgary, UofT? How can the CBC stay silent when our children fear going to school?
http://www.cjpme.org/DisplayDocument.aspx?DO=853&RecID=454&DocumentID=1841&SaveMode=0
http://www.jewishindependent.ca/oldsite/archives/feb09/archives09feb20-03.html
Where are the reports on the number of universities boycotting Israel-the only democracy in the Middle East? Where are the round tables talking about the abuse of girls and women around the world, the gender apartheid of Saudi Arabia, the abuse of the Nigerian girls? Yes, there was mention made, today, after almost 6 months of silence-too busy reporting on Israel, perhaps? How about talking about the murder of gays in Arab countries?
These are stories that balance attacks against Israel by academics and feminists who prefer to attack Israel than attack the policies of countries that abuse women and gays. Why have I not read a report on the need for organizations like StandWithUS, dedicated to making campuses safe for Jews? In the year 2014, Jews fear for their lives on campus. You remain silent.
This is the bias playing out at CBC. Your silence.
The CBC knows or ought to know the danger of anti-semitism let loose in our country-again, and therefore should endeavour to ensure that reports about Israel be balanced and in context. That means clearly stating that Israel, like Palestine, was declared a nation in 1948 yet the Arab countries refused to accept the Jewish state and attacked repeatedly-48, 67, 73, and more recently Hamas has attacked from Gaza. These facts are easily put into 15 second sound-bites-countering the almost never –ending report on the numbers of dead civilians-mostly women and children, which, statistically is impossible. (That your reporters continued to make these claims, that your senior editor permitted these statistics indicates to me that the CBC is ether incompetent, ignorant or willfully blind. As stated in the Washington Post article on 40 Questions, your reporters could have refused to give the numbers-because they made no sense).
Without this context, reports from Gaza, specifically during Operation Protective Edge, leave the audience believing that Israel is the aggressor and Israel is responding disproportionally, as if she attacked Gaza for no reason. The prism though which all is viewed is skewed.
Your reporters, while filming damage in Gaza, failed to remind the audience of the fact that Hamas has a history of hiding weapons in schools, mosques, hospitals, homes. That Hamas has launched 10,000 rockets into Israel over the years. That Hamas took billions of dollars and instead of improving the lives of their residents, they built terror tunnels into Israel for the sole purpose of attacking innocent Israeli citizens, kidnapping and terrorizing them. These facts would help explain the "blockade," why Israel will not allow open borders into Gaza for fear of more abuse of humanitarian aid. These are facts that can be stated in short sound-bites over the pictures of the destruction in Gaza-especially the damage done to destroy the terror tunnels.
As I have written to you before, bias comes in many forms. One is commission-stating hate loud and clear. The other is in omission-where media do not report on events. Eighty percent of Canadians tend to ignore the Middle East unless brought to their attention. When your reports from the Middle East are based in Gaza, home to Hamas terrorists, the audience assumes that Israel is the aggressor because your reporters are not reporting from Israel-the victim in this. We are accustomed to hearing from reporters in the countries under attack-not the aggressor. Which leads me to these questions:
How many CBC reporters were stationed in Israel during Operation Protective Edge? How many were stationed in Gaza?
How many reporters were following and chronicling the atrocities in Syria during the summer of 2014 compared to the number of reporters following Israel? How many reports from Syria were posted on-line, heard on radio and seen on TV during this time?
It seems that Israel is far more important to the media than all the other countries in the world.
“News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.” Why do you suppose the CBC is focused on Israel and not these other hot spots?
Your defense of Andrew Chang was disingenuous. You did not explain why he did not ask the representatives of Gaza/Hamas how they felt about the fact that Hamas broke truces with Israel leading to more destruction in response to Hamas rockets. Nor did he ask the Arab guests how they felt about the tunnels built for terrorizing Israel, kidnapping citizens, killing others. Or how did they feel about the fact that their leaders spent years and billions of humanitarian dollars building tunnels not infrastructure? I never heard any interviewer asking these questions. Perhaps you can direct me to those interviews.
That you do not see this as bias speaks to the fact that it is endemic and systemic. It is part of the CBC DNA, the prism through which you view the Middle East.
It is well know that the CBC has a left wing ideology and as a tax-funded media outlet, you do not have the right to be biased; a bias that has been at the CBC for as long as I can remember and discussed even longer. Complaints lodged by organizations like Honest Reporting speak to that bias.
As a member of a small minority in this country, I have the right to live in peace and not be attacked for being Jewish. And those attacks increase during times of difficulty in the Middle East that is exacerbated by media bias. And the CBC claims to be the voice of Canada.
I refer to the interview given by Pierre Elliott Trudeau to a CBC reporter during the 1970 October crisis. The reporter said “…you seemed to be saying that you thought the press had been less than responsible in its coverage of this story so far.”
Pierre Trudeau answered,
“Not less than responsible. I was suggesting that they should perhaps use a bit more restraint… the main thing that the FLQ is trying to gain from this is a hell of a lot of publicity for the movement…and I am suggesting that the more recognition you give to them the greater the victory is, and I'm not interested in giving them a victory.”
That same admonition holds true regarding Hamas. You gave Hamas, a terrorist, organization like the FLQ, a podium, a platform upon which to spread their lies and hate. You aided them in their attempt to discredit Israel, the country under attack. You aided them by reporting from Gaza rather than Israel. You aided them by interviewing them. Who interviews terrorists? And why? To what end?
Yes, you referred to your sources that declared that the CBC was above the intimidation of Hamas. Or that so few were influenced. But my sources, including Arab Israelis, say otherwise. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/07/31/forty-questions-for-the-international-media-in-gaza/
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/is-the-media-guilty-of-war-crimes-and-crimes-against-humanity/
You did not respond to the statements from journalists around the world that were in the article I provided. http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/is-the-media-guilty-of-war-crimes-and-crimes-against-humanity/
http://time.com/3035937/gaza-israel-hamas-palestinian-casualties/
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/who-is-the-real-enemy-2/
“There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)”
I also provided you with a link to the attacks by Hamas on reporters in 2011.Are you suggesting that Hamas has changed?
You wrote to me:
"Context is everything in this particular narrative. And context is so incredibly difficult to get right in this particular story so when you focus on what’s happening today, you lose the context of the last 60 and 70 years of history with how we got to this point. And when you focus on the last 60 0r 70 years, you lose the drama of what’s happening today at this particular moment. So you have to be able to do both in the same."
You can do both at the same time with appropriate sound-bites. I have given you short sound-bites that put history in context. You could also mention that Israel is the thriving democracy that is attacked constantly by Fatah and Hamas whose charters declare the need to exterminate the Jewish state and murder Jews. I do not hear condemnation of the education provided to students in Gaza and under the PA: kill Jews. Cartoons teach the ideal of being a martyr-kill Jews. Then you say to me that your interviews with Jews and Muslims-interfaith- are appropriate without anyone mentioning that one side-the Muslim side, Hamas, Fatah -calls for the annihilation of Israel. I wonder how your viewer’s would respond if they heard that each time you had a discussion about the Middle East. Those facts would certainly have added context and a prism through which one can view the hostilities.
And then there was Mr. Nagler’s response to the control of information. He made a moral equivalency between Israel, an open democracy and Gaza-controlled by a terrorist organization that kills its own people when suspected of collaboration.
“In any conflict all sides want to control information. That is a given. Hamas does it, so does Israel. For obvious reasons they both want to control the release of any military information that might be of use to the enemy. Hamas has no formal system of censorship, but as you likely know, all foreign reporters working in Israel must agree to work under rules set out by the Israeli Military Censor. Stories on a list of topics – chiefly military issues and nuclear weapons, but also potentially oil and water supplies, among others – must be submitted for censorship prior to publication.”
He is saying that Hamas has no censorship but Israel does. That is bias that cannot be ignored. Hamas has a history of controlling the message. Israel like any other democracy will not allow reporters to see military installations but reporters roam freely. Apparently not in Gaza. Had the reporters roamed freely they would have reported early on about the rockets from residential areas, schools, mosques, hospitals. They would have reported on the tunnels. They would have questioned the statistics regarding the deaths in Gaza-that the male/female, civilian/terrorist numbers made no sense. They would have heard about Hamas forcing citizens to stay in buildings that were about to be bombed. And your reporters would have mentioned multiple times that Israel called Gazans telling them to leave. No other army in the world has worked so hard to avoid civilian death as has the IDF. I don’t recall a documentary, let alone a comment, about that.
I find your review to be facile. As one who has studied ethics and been involved in life and death ethical decisions, I find it odd that you would be chosen as one to review complaints. You have been working with the CBC for more than 25 years. Not only do you come from within the system, you rewrote and redeveloped CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices that you now implement. How can you state unequivocally that you can arbitrate complaints against yourself? In my opinion, this is an egregious conflict of interest.
You wrote in the CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices:
“We provide professional judgment based on facts and expertise. We do not promote any particular point of view on matters of public debate.”
Yet, it is well known in Canada and elsewhere that the CBC has a left of centre bias. A bias that can be dangerous. I refer you to the Euston Manifesto.
Madame Ombudsman, you do promote a perspective but you don’t see it because you are in it.
Again thank you for your review and posting it on line.
As always I look forward to your comments.
Diane Weber Bederman
Here are the contacts-Esther Enkin [email protected]
Jennifer McGuire Senior Editor [email protected]
Jack Nagler [email protected]
Shelley Glover-Heritage Minister Federal Government [email protected]
