An appointment with the courts awaits Western media executives complicit in the Gaza genocide

A comprehensive analysis of over 14,000 news articles reveals systematic biases in Western media reports on Israel and Gaza, including the sanitization of Palestinian suffering . . . 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

When the unspeakable horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza finally grinds to a halt—after the rubble settles on shattered Gaza neighbourhoods, as the echoes of potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths fade, lost to bombings, snipers, starvation, and disease—there will be a reckoning not just for the perpetrators, but also for the enablers. There will be little mercy for the Western governments that funnelled billions in bullets and bombs to Israel, neither for the United States which vetoed UN ceasefires on their behalf, nor for the universities that silenced pro-Palestinian voices while doing the bidding of Zionist donors.

However, one of the sharpest blade of justice will need to carve deepest into the heart of Western news media—the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, CBC, CTV, The Daily Mail, and their ilk. These so-called pillars of “free press” have devolved into shameless Israeli propagandists, laundering their lies, dehumanizing Palestinians, and fuelling the very mass murder on which they pretend to report. For decades, they have peddled Israeli anti-Palestinian propaganda and racism as objective journalism, but since October 7, 2023, their complicity has escalated into active participation in an ongoing genocide. Yes, a reckoning is coming—one that will drag media executives, producers, and editors into courtrooms, force their corporations to pay Holocaust-level reparations to survivors, and shatter the myth of Western media’s moral authority forever.

This isn’t hyperbole, it’s historical inevitability. As Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the United Nations, and over 800 genocide scholars have documented, Israel’s campaign in Gaza meets every criterion of genocide: intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group through killings, causing serious harm, and imposing conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction. Yet Western media didn’t just fail to report this truth—they buried it under an avalanche of Israeli hasbara (propaganda). From the genocide’s outset, news outlets like CNN and the BBC instructed their staff to avoid using terms like “genocide,” “occupation,” or “war crimes” in their reporting, opting instead for mealy-mouthed euphemisms that absolve Israel while vilifying Palestinians as “terrorists” or “Hamas sympathizers.” This isn’t sloppy journalism. It’s a deliberate editorial choice, rooted in decades of anti-Palestinian prejudice and racism that predates October 2023.

Consider the pattern, etched in stone long before the current slaughter. For over 75 years, Western media has framed Palestinians through a lens of Israeli victimhood and Palestinian villainy. During the 1948 Nakba—when Zionist militias forced 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and committed massacres butchering thousands, Western news outlets downplayed ethnic cleansing, portraying it as a “civil war” sparked by Arab aggression. Fast-forward to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, where Israeli forces enabled Christian militias to slaughter 3,500 Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, a tragedy where media coverage focused on Israeli “retaliation” against attacks by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, with scant mention of the victims’ humanity.

This historical amnesia isn’t accidental, it’s systemic. A 2023 analysis of news media coverage by the Arab Center Washington DC revealed that US media consistently omits the context of Israel’s brutal occupation, Jewish settlement expansion, dispossession of Palestinian lands, and Israeli apartheid, presenting their actions as defensive acts rather than colonial aggression. By 2023, this bias had metastasized to a point where there was a little sympathy shown for the victims of Israel’s genocide, with the vast majority of Western legacy news outlets favouring the Israeli narrative—the myth of “40 beheaded babies” or “Hamas rape epidemics” presented without evidence—even while social media was flooded with Palestinian testimonies of daily atrocities committed by Israel.

Now, amplify this to the Gaza genocide’s scale. Over 25 months, Israel has flattened 90% of Gaza’s buildings, poisoned its water, destroyed its hospitals, bulldozed agricultural lands, and engineered a famine that kills children by the hundreds weekly. What is the reaction of Western media? They platform Israeli officials to spew unchallenged falsehoods. Take CNN’s Jake Tapper, who in November 2023 reported on US intelligence claims that Al-Shifa Hospital was a “Hamas command center,” amplifying unverified Israeli assertions without immediate scrutiny or counter-evidence from Palestinian sources. In December 2023, BBC reporting allowed Israeli officials to suggest the Gaza death toll was inflated, with claims that one Hamas fighter was killed for every two civilians—figures later contradicted by UN data showing over 18,000 dead, including thousands of children. These aren’t isolated slips. They’re policy. Leaked internal memos from CNN reveal executives quashing stories on Palestinian suffering to avoid “inflaming” pro-Israel advertisers, while BBC guidelines mandate “balance” that equates one of the most powerful militaries in the world with a people who have neither an army, navy, nor air force.

Contrast this fawning deference to pro-Israel guests with the inquisition faced by pro-Palestinian voices. Palestinian analysts like Omar Baddar have appeared on CNN only to have their critiques framed amid accusations of one-sidedness, with segments often edited to emphasize Israeli perspectives over Palestinian context. Meanwhile, anti-genocide protesters—students, doctors, even Holocaust survivors—are branded as “terrorist sympathizers” in headlines from the US magazine The Atlantic to Canada’s National Post, their chants for ceasefires twisted into calls for Jewish extermination. This double standard isn’t bias. It’s a machine of suppression, mirroring the very propaganda tactics that enabled the Holocaust.

Yes, let’s confront the ugly parallel between what the Nazis did and what Israel is doing. Western media’s role in Gaza echoes the Nazi press’s complicity in the destruction of Jews and other minorities. In 1930s Germany, outlets like Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter didn’t just report; they incited. This fascist rags spewed caricatures of Jews as vermin, rapists, and economic saboteurs, dehumanizing them to justify Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass when the windows of Jewish businesses were destroyed—as well as the concentration camps. Editors faced no push back—indeed, they were rewarded—while Jewish voices were silenced, their pleas dismissed as “Bolshevik lies.” Sound familiar?

Fast-forward to 2023 and 2024 where The New York Times has run op-eds from current and former Israeli officials and their supporters in the US justifying the Israel’s criminal actions against Palestinians, and labelling Palestinian resistance and anti-genocide protests as “terrorism”. These commentaries go largely unchallenged by editors who challenge critiques of Zionism and Israel by labelling them as “hate speech.” A comprehensive analysis of over 14,000 news articles reveals systematic biases in Western media reports on Israel and Gaza, including the sanitization of Palestinian suffering through euphemisms like “collateral damage”, using terms like “died” rather than “killed”, and barring their journalists from using descriptors like “brutal” or “horrific”, that downplay or delegitimize Palestinian deaths.

The resemblance between the media during the Nazi era and today when we look at the promotion of racism. Nazi media normalized antisemitism by portraying Jews as an existential threat, their suffering as self-inflicted. Western coverage does the same for Palestinians. A report from Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative found that 2023-2024 coverage embedded anti-Palestinian racism through disproportionate focus on Israeli victims and minimization of Palestinian grief, implying inherent criminality in their deaths. Phrases like “human animals” (echoing Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s October 2023 statement) seep into TV news scripts without quotation marks, embedding anti-Palestinian hate as fact. An analysis by Vox has labelled this “anti-Palestinian racism” as a structural prejudice that erases Palestinian agency, history, and grief, rendering their genocide palatable to Western audiences steeped in colonial myths. Protests against this slaughter? They are labelled “riots”, “anti-Jewish hate demonstrations”, or “antisemitic mobs,” fuelling arrests from US campuses to Canadian streets, amid broader crackdowns on pro-Palestinian activism.

This racism isn’t abstract, it’s lethal. By dehumanizing Palestinians—calling Rafah and other parts of Gaza “evacuated” rather than “ethnically cleansed”—Western news media executives justify Israeli violence against a defenceless people. They bear as much responsibility for mass murder in Gaza as did Nazi newspaper and radio owners did for dehumanizing the millions killed in concentration camps. And like the post-World War Two Nuremberg trials which saw dozens of Nazi officials sitting in the docks, accountability for those media executives who enabled the Gaza atrocities through their media coverage must follow by charges being laid. This can be done at the International Criminal Court or in nations with uncompromised legal systems under the legal concept of “universal jurisdiction,” where international law allows national courts to prosecute individuals for the most serious international crimes—genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes—regardless of where the crimes were committed.

Media Watch International and Al-Shabaka Policy Center argue that under the Genocide Convention and Rome Statute, complicit propagandists can face war crimes charges. Will we see major media personalities from CNN or BBC or the CBC charged and tried? This remains to be seen. But if they chose political expediency and lies over truth, if they withheld footage sympathetic to Palestinians, or platformed pro-Israel voices while suppressing Palestinian narratives, to appease Zionist and Israeli interests, while Gaza’s journalists were murdered by the scores, then they need to stand trial.

The net must widen to catch all who were complicit. Producers who scripted so-called “balanced” segments equating occupier and occupied. Editors who buried or ignored UN reports on famine. Companies that supported Israel and ignored their crimes must pay a price, legally and financially. Once the trials are over the companies that employed them must be fined, and they must be forced to pay into a Palestinian Victims Fund, modelled on the Holocaust Claims Conference. In Canada, where CBC and CTV’s coverage rivals CNN’s or MSNBC’s in its unbalanced coverage of the Palestinian genocide, CRTC licenses should be reviews and executives hauled before the courts. This isn’t vengeance, it’s justice delayed by decades of Israeli impunity.

But the rot runs deeper, demanding a cultural purge. Western media’s failure isn’t mere negligence, it’s a betrayal of the ideals which they claim to uphold—truth, accountability, humanity. For years, they’ve normalized Israel’s apartheid regime, from the blockade of Gaza starting in 2007 to the 2014 onslaught that killed more than 2,200 Palestinian civilians. The coverage back then included sympathetic profiles of Israeli “fear,” while there were perfunctory tallies of Palestinian “casualties.” The same pattern persists today. A 2025 study in Third World Quarterly details how outlets like The Daily Mail, The New York Times and The Washington Post employ “ethical collapse” in silencing Gaza’s voices, prioritizing Israeli-friendly narratives over journalistic integrity. This isn’t journalism. It’s complicity in genocidal violence, a modern echo of the British Palestine Mandate press that greased the wheels for Zionist settlement.

Imagine the trials with media executives and editors in the docks, their memos banning the use of the words “genocide”, “occupation” or “Palestine” projected onto screens for the court to see, proving they chose complicity or silence over humanity. Paying reparations cannot be optional. There must be a global fund established, seeded by fines for those who were complicit and seized assets, to rebuild Gaza’s soul. This would be in addition to reparations paid to Palestinians by nations like the US, Canada, Germany and the UK.

One of the lessons from this is that media can’t be left free to push ugly and dehumanizing narratives. There must be a legal mechanism to ensure that the ideals of truth in news media are upheld, along with mandatory fact-checking, diverse sourcing, and penalties for stories that attack the very humanity of an oppressed and subjugated people. Until then, every broadcast, every news story is a potential bullet for vulnerable peoples like the Palestinians.

Western media’s facade of neutrality and balanced news coverage of this Palestinian Holocaust has crumbled in Gaza’s rubble. They didn’t report a genocide, they enabled one, their screens stained with Palestinian blood. When trials loom and reparations flow, let the producers, editors and executives tremble. The world watched as Western news media gave Israel a pass as it destroyed a society, deliberately killed tens of thousands, and demonstrated a level of evil not seen since World War Two. They streamed Gaza’s slaughter live, yet tuned out the screams. No more. The reckoning is coming, and it will be as merciless as the crimes it avenges.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

The Palestinian Exception: Western media’s anti-Palestinian racism and complicity in genocide

Just as Nazi propaganda desensitized the German public to Jewish suffering, Western media’s refusal to speak the truth about Israel’s violence against Palestinians normalizes their mass murder. 

  

By Fareed Khan 

  

On July 17, 2025, an Israeli airstrike severely damaged Gaza’s last remaining Catholic church, a sanctuary sheltering the elderly and children amidst a relentless 21 month military assault. The attack, which killed dozens and severely damaged a rare Christian landmark in the besieged enclave, garnered fleeting attention in Western media outlets like The New York Times and BBC. However, this coverage stands in stark contrast to the near silence surrounding the systematic destruction of more than a thousand mosques and the desecration of Muslim cemeteries in Gaza by Israeli forces since October 2023. This selective outrage is not an anomaly but a manifestation of a deeply embedded anti-Palestinian racism in Western news media, often termed the "Palestinian exception."

This phenomenon—characterized by biased, negative coverage of Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation while amplifying positive narratives about Israel—echoes the dehumanizing propaganda of Nazi Germany’s news media towards Jews in the 1930s. The Western media’s role in dehumanizing Palestinians, as explored in scholarly analyses of how narratives about marginalized groups are shaped, enables Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. This systemic bias, which portrays Palestinians as less deserving of empathy and humanity, demands that news corporations and their executives one day face legal accountability for their criminal decisions, and provide restitution to Palestinians for their complicity in the Gaza genocide, the way Jews were given restitution for the Holocaust.

The Palestinian Exception: A Legacy of Bias

 

The bombing of the Gaza Catholic church briefly pierced Western media’s consciousness, likely because it resonated with Christian audiences in the West, and because Pope Leo felt compelled to respond. However, the deliberate destruction of over 1,200 mosques and desecration of Muslim cemeteries in Gaza by Israeli forces since October 2023 has received scant attention. This disparity exemplifies the Palestinian exception, where Palestinian suffering is systematically marginalized or ignored while Israeli narratives are elevated. Studies, such as one by The Intercept analyzing over 1,000 articles from major US outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times from October to November 2023, reveal a clear pattern: Israeli casualties were covered with emotive language like “massacre” or “slaughter,” while Palestinian deaths were reported in clinical, passive terms, often as mere statistics. Furthermore, during this period, mentions of antisemitism in these outlets outnumbered those of Islamophobia by a ratio of 7:1, despite a significant surge in anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab hate crimes in the US, surpassing that of the period after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This bias is not new but has been documented for decades, with analysis showing that a majority of news stories on Israeli violence against Palestinians failed to mention that incidents occurred in occupied Palestinian territory, erasing the context of Israel’s illegal occupation. Similarly, a Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) study of NPR’s coverage during the Second Intifada (2000–2005) showed that while Israeli and Palestinian deaths occurred in similar numbers, NPR reported eight out of ten Israeli deaths but only three out of ten Palestinian deaths, creating a skewed perception of the conflict’s death toll. Palestinian voices continue to be given a fraction of the airtime or column space afforded to pro-Israel perspectives today. A 2023 report by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring noted that British media frequently framed stories from an Israeli viewpoint, often without verifying Israeli claims, and without giving Palestinian voices equal coverage.

The Language of Dehumanization

Western media’s language in reporting on Palestinians often perpetuates anti-Palestinian tropes. The phrase “Israel’s right to defend itself” is commonly used, framing Israeli military actions—frequently disproportionate and targeting Palestinian civilians—as justified. Conversely, Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation is routinely labelled “terrorism,” with groups like Hamas demonized without historical context. For instance, following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, outlets like CNN, BBC, and Canadian news media widely broadcast Israel’s lie about babies being beheaded and burned in ovens—claims later debunked by Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. These reports fuelled outrage and justified Israel’s response, which, by July 2025, has killed nearly 69,000 Palestinians, 30% of them children. Moreover, Western reporters often subject Palestinian interviewees to aggressive questioning, such as “Do you condemn Hamas?” while Israeli interviewees face no similar scrutiny about their government’s criminal actions, and their statements are frequently accepted without verification, the way the “beheaded babies” lie was.

This double standard reflects what Palestinian-American academic Edward Said described in his 1997 book Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World as the media’s role in constructing a dehumanized image of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians. Said argued that Western news media portrays people from these communities as inherently violent and irrational, reinforcing stereotypes that justify their marginalization. He talked about how the media shapes public perceptions and selectively filters information to control what people know or don’t know about Islam and Muslims.

This framing is evident in the coverage of the Gaza genocide, where Palestinian deaths are reported as numbers, often prefaced with qualifiers like “as reported by the Hamas-run health ministry,” casting doubt on their credibility, while Israeli casualty figures are presented as authoritative. Such journalistic choices desensitize audiences to Palestinian suffering, dehumanizing them to most Western audiences.

Historical Context and Media Silence

Western media’s omission of critical historical context further entrenches this anti-Palestinian bias. Few outlets acknowledge that Hamas, portrayed as the epitome of Palestinian terrorism, came to be a viable political force in Gaza through Israeli support and funding beginning in the 1980s into the 2000s. The goal being to undermine the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and derail the Oslo Peace Accords. This strategic backing was intended to prevent the creation of an independent Palestinian state, yet it is rarely mentioned, allowing media to frame Hamas as an existential threat without acknowledging Israeli complicity. This erasure distorts the narrative and obscures the root causes of Palestinian resistance.

The destruction of Gaza’s cultural and religious sites further illustrates this bias. The systematic targeting of mosques, Muslim cemeteries, schools and universities by Israeli forces echoes the Nazi destruction of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in 1930s Germany and during the Holocaust. Yet, while the bombing of Gaza’s Catholic church garnered some coverage in Western media, the obliteration of Islamic sites has been largely ignored. This selective focus reflects a racist and bigoted cultural hierarchy at the executive level where Muslim and Palestinian suffering is deemed less newsworthy. 

 

This selective focus reflects a racist and bigoted cultural hierarchy at the executive level in news rooms, where Muslim and Palestinian suffering is deemed less newsworthy. As Said noted, Western media operates within a framework that views Arab civilian deaths as an acceptable price for Israeli security.

Parallels with Nazi Propaganda

The parallels between Western media’s anti-Palestinian bias and Nazi Germany’s propaganda against Jews are chilling. In the 1930s, Nazi media portrayed Jews as threats to German society, using the most egregious stereotypes and selective reporting to justify discrimination, dehumanization and violence. Similarly, Western media’s framing of Palestinians as inherently violent, as "terrorists", or complicit in their own suffering—through antagonistic questions or by downplaying Israeli crimes—rationalizes their subjugation. Just as Nazi propaganda desensitized the German public to Jewish suffering, Western media’s refusal to label Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, despite affirmations from top genocide and Holocaust scholars, normalizes the mass killing of Palestinians.

Amnesty International’s 2024 report concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, citing deliberate conditions aimed at the physical destruction of Palestinians, including mass displacement and infrastructure devastation. Yet, major outlets like The New York Times and BBC avoid using the term “genocide” in their reporting, with Times internal memos instructing journalists to refrain from using terms like “ethnic cleansing” or “occupied territory”. This linguistic sanitization mirrors Nazi media’s use of language to obscure Nazi crimes, ensuring public detachment from the human toll.

The Global Recognition Gap

The media’s refusal to recognize Palestine as a state further exemplifies this bias. While 149 countries, including most of the Global South, recognize Palestinian statehood, Western media often avoids the term “Palestine,” aligning with the US-led Western alliance. This linguistic erasure delegitimizes Palestinian identity and aspirations, reinforcing their dehumanization. Furthermore, Western media’s biased framing of Palestinian stories reduces them to mere victims or terrorists, never as people with agency a right to self-determination, or struggling against the longest and most brutal military occupation in modern history.

Accountability and Justice

Western media’s complicity in anti-Palestinian racism and the Gaza genocide demands accountability. News corporations and their executives have not only failed to uphold journalistic ethics and integrity, but have actively contributed to the dehumanization of Palestinians, thereby supporting Israel's racist anti-Palestinian narratives, and enabled its violations of international law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued provisional measures in 2024 ordering Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, yet these rulings are often misrepresented in Western coverage. For example, a Wall Street Journal headline falsely claimed the ICJ rejected a ceasefire demand, when the real story was that it had found a “plausible” basis for genocide allegations.

Just as Nazi propagandists faced justice at Nuremberg for inciting hatred against Jews, Western news executives who played a role in perpetuating anti-Palestinian narratives leading to genocide must one day stand in a courtroom and face justice. Their role in amplifying Israeli propaganda, suppressing Palestinian voices, and sanitizing genocide parallels the media’s complicity in historical atrocities. News corporations like The New York Times, BBC, CNN, and CTV Globe Media, Global News, the CBC, and the Post Media group in Canada, should be held liable for compensation and restitution to Palestinians for their part in enabling the Palestinian genocide. Legal precedents, such as reparations paid by German companies and Swiss banks complicit in the Holocaust, suggest a framework for holding Western media accountable for their role in dehumanization and violence.

The bombing of Gaza’s last Catholic church is a stark reminder of the Palestinian exception, where Western media selectively highlights certain tragedies while ignoring others based on cultural, racial and religious prejudice. This anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, rooted in decades of skewed coverage, dehumanizes Palestinians and has enabled Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

 

Edward Said’s Covering Islam remains a prescient warning of how media shapes narratives to marginalize entire populations. By prioritizing Israeli narratives, amplifying unverified claims, and erasing Palestinian context, Western media mirrors the propaganda tactics of media in Nazi Germany, desensitizing audiences to Palestinian suffering.

The time for accountability is approaching when Western news corporations and their executives must face justice for their complicity, and ultimately provide restitution to Palestinians for their role supporting and enabling Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinian people. Only through such reckoning can the cycle of dehumanization of Palestinians be broken, a more truthful narrative about the oppression and subjugation of the Palestinian people emerge, and decades of pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian propaganda be rewritten. 
  
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Canadian news media executives must face justice for their complicity in Gaza’s genocide

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.