At Nuremberg Nazi media figures were convicted for inciting genocide against Jews by dehumanizing them. Canadian news executives must also be tried for narratives that dehumanized Palestinians.
By Fareed Khan
The unrelenting carnage in Gaza, where over 63,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since October 2023, demands accountability not only for those wielding weapons and issuing orders to commit genocide but also for those crafting public narratives that enable such atrocities. Executives at Canadian mainstream media outlets, including CBC, CTV, Global News, and major newspapers like the National Post and the Globe and Mail, bear a profound responsibility for perpetuating a pro-Israel bias that largely obscures Palestinian suffering, sanitizes Israel’s genocidal acts, and suppresses evidence of ongoing atrocities.
A stark example of this media bias is the near-total silence in Canadian and Western news media on a recent Harvard Dataverse report by Israeli academic Yaakov Garb estimating that 377,000 Palestinians are missing—presumed dead, unaccounted for, or buried beneath the rubble of demolished buildings. As well, the media has ignored a survey commissioned in March by Pennsylvania State University and conducted by Israeli scholar Tamir Sorek that was published in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. It revealed that 82% of Jewish Israelis wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza, 56% supported ethnically cleansing Israel of Palestinians, and 47% favoured exterminating all Palestinians in Gaza. None of this has been reported in Canadian mainstream media.
Even before October 2023, CBC news executives killed reporter story pitches to cover the 2021 Human Rights Watch report designating Israel an apartheid state, the Sheikh Jarrah evictions in Jerusalem the same year, Israel assassinating Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, and the Israeli bombing of the Jenin refugee camp in July 2023.
These are merely a handful of examples of editorial directives and slanted reporting practices resulting from the decades-long anti-Palestinian framing by these media outlets that aligns disturbingly with Israeli interests and propaganda, that has facilitated the Palestinian genocide. Just as Nazi news media figures were prosecuted at Nuremberg for their complicity in the Holocaust, these Canadian media executives must face trial—whether in Canada or at The Hague—for their part in pushing media narratives that support Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.
Under the 1948 Genocide Convention,
genocide encompasses acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or
in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Complicity in
genocide, including aiding and abetting through propaganda, is equally
punishable. Canadian media’s news coverage of Israel’s atrocities in
Gaza reveals a pattern of distortion that meets this threshold.
Investigative journalism by independent media sites The Maple and The Breach has exposed how executives and editors at CBC, CTV, and Global News, as well as at the Post Media chain and the Globe and Mail,
have enforced a narrative that favours Israel while marginalizing or
negating Palestinian voices, effectively endorsing the conditions for
genocide.
One of the most insidious practices is the deliberate
manipulation of language. Reporters at broadcast and print media outlets
have been explicitly instructed to avoid terms like “genocide,” “Palestine,” “horrific,” “brutal,” or “slaughter” when describing Palestinian deaths
or Gaza’s destruction by Israel. Instead, Palestinians are described
with passive terms like “died” or “dying”, euphemisms that strip agency
from Israel’s criminal actions. In contrast, Israeli victims of Hamas’s
October 7, 2023, attack have been described as being “killed,”
“murdered,” or “slaughtered,” amplifying their suffering with emotive
terminology. This linguistic double standard dehumanizes Palestinians,
presenting their deaths as passive and taking place in a vacuum rather
than the result of deliberate actions by the Israeli military. Such
framing echoes Nazi-era media,
which minimized Jewish suffering, or worse, supported Nazi policies, to
normalize the Holocaust, a precedent that led to convictions at
Nuremberg for propagandists like Julius Streicher.
Quantitative analysis further damns Canadian mainstream media. An investigative study by The Breach revealed that CBC’s flagship program, The National,
featured 42% more Israeli voices than Palestinian ones in the first
month of the Gaza conflict, despite Palestinians suffering seven times
more deaths. Similarly, CTV’s National News, Canada’s most-watched news broadcast, consistently prioritized Israeli perspectives, with pro-Israel voices,
particularly Israeli government voices, receiving far more airtime and
attributions in stories than Palestinian ones, and rarely being
challenged by reporters when their statements were questionable.
Meanwhile, Global News suppressed critical reporting of Israel, with
sources claiming an anchor’s stories
exposing Israeli actions were refused airtime. This imbalance is not
journalistic oversight but a systemic editorial choice to amplify the
government of Israel’s narrative while silencing Palestinian voices as
Israel was committing mass murder in Gaza.
Reporters’ failure to challenge Israeli claims during
interviews for mainstream news outlets compounds this bias. Statements
by Israeli officials—often riddled with inaccuracies and at times
outright lies, such as denying starvation in Gaza or blaming Hamas for
Palestinian civilian deaths—were aired without scrutiny
or verification. In contrast, Palestinian accounts are often met with
skepticism or outright dismissal. For instance, CBC reporters
interrupted interviewees over 100 times when they raised allegations of
genocide, a tactic rarely applied to Israeli guests. This selective
journalistic rigour mirrors the “Palestine exception” in Canadian media,
where Israel’s actions
are insulated from the critical lens applied to other conflicts. By
refusing to question Israeli propaganda, media executives enable a
narrative that justifies mass violence, much as news media in Nazi
Germany disseminated lies to enable the apathy of the German public
towards state persecution of the Jewish population.
This bias is not new but rooted in decades of anti-Palestinian racism in Canadian reporting. Coverage
of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 has
consistently framed Palestinians as aggressors and “terrorists” and
Israel as a victim defending itself. The 1948 Nakba, when 750,000
Palestinians were expelled and tens of thousands murdered, is rarely
mentioned, erasing the historical context of dispossession. Instead,
stories emphasize Israel’s “security needs,” ignoring the Apartheid system documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN. This framing desensitizes audiences to Palestinian suffering, paving the way for acceptance of Gaza’s current catastrophe. As The Maple notes, Canadian media’s refusal to cover polls revealing Jewish Israeli support for extreme policies in Gaza further shields audiences from Israel’s genocidal intent.
The
legal case for prosecuting Canadian media executives is robust. The
Genocide Convention’s Article III(c) criminalizes “direct and public
incitement to commit genocide,” while Article III(e) targets complicity.
By systematically distorting the reality of Palestinians in Gaza in
favour of Israel—downplaying their pain and suffering, amplifying
Israeli narratives, and suppressing news about the crimes committed by
Israel against Palestinians—news executives aid Israel’s ability to act
with impunity and sell the dehumanization of Palestinians to the
Canadian public. The International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) 2024 provisional measures
against Israel, citing plausible genocide, underscore the gravity of
such complicity. In addition, Canadian law, incorporating the Convention
through the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act,
allows for domestic prosecution of genocide-related offences.
Alternatively, Canadians also have the option of filing complaints
against Canadian news executives at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague which has ultimate jurisdiction over cases relating to complicity in genocide, as seen in the arrest warrants it issued for Israeli leaders.
Historical precedent supports this. At Nuremberg, media figures like Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer, were convicted for inciting genocide through propaganda that dehumanized Jews. Hans Fritzsche,
a radio propagandist, was tried for shaping public opinion to enable
Nazi atrocities. Canadian executives’ actions—directing biased coverage,
enforcing anti-Palestinian language, and silencing dissent—parallel
these cases. Their influence over public perception, especially in a
country with significant diplomatic support for Israel, makes their
complicity undeniable.
Critics may argue that media bias, however egregious, does not constitute legal complicity. Yet propaganda’s role in enabling genocide is well-established. The Rwandan genocide saw radio stations prosecuted for inciting violence through biased narratives. Canadian media’s vast reach—CBC alone commands a $1.68 billion public budget—amplifies its impact. By shaping public and political opinion to tolerate Israel’s actions, news media executives contribute to Canada’s failure to enforce a ceasefire, halt arms exports and uphold international law, further establishing their complicity in genocide.
The counterargument that journalists merely report facts ignores the editorial gate keeping exposed by The Breach and The Maple in their investigations. Reporters have faced censorship and even been fired, with CTV’s Bell Media banning the word “Palestine” and CBC disciplining staff for sharing critical journalism on social media. These are not neutral decisions but deliberate efforts to align with Israel’s anti-Palestinian racist narratives. The Maple’s investigation into Post Media’s rewriting of wire stories to favour Israel—replacing “militants” with “terrorists” or omitting “occupied” from Palestinian territories—reveals a broader industry pattern of clear anti-Palestinian racism similar to what Jews faced in Europe in the 1930s. This top-down control implicates executives, producers, and editors not just reporters, in a racist propaganda machine that has contributed to genocide.
The human toll in Gaza—potentially over 100,000 children buried under rubble, families starved, hospitals and supposed “safe zones” bombed—demands accountability beyond the battlefield perpetrators, and the Israeli political and military leaders that ordered the genocidal acts. Canadian media executives, by whitewashing Israel’s actions, have blood on their hands, and they are not alone given that this anti-Palestinian prejudice is widespread among Western media outlets. The trial of these media executives, whether in Canada or at The Hague, would send a message—propaganda disguised as news that enables genocide is a crime against humanity.
As Nuremberg showed, those who wield pens and microphones to dehumanize and distort are as culpable as those who wield weapons. Justice for Palestinians requires dismantling this infrastructure of complicity, starting in the boardrooms and executive offices of CBC, CTV, Global News, and at the major newspaper outlets that peddle biased news to the Canadian public that enables the most horrific crimes under international law. Failure to do so would contribute to the commission of the ultimate crime, and fracture the foundations of on which justice and our collective humanity have been built.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment