UN Report Found Israel Committed 'Mediacide'... Canadian News Helped

As The Catch has written before in multiple instances, Israel has targeted journalists and killed them on a scale never-before seen in history. Canadian news media has shown their bias towards Israel in both qualitative and quantitative analyses. When it comes to Canadian journalism, Palestinians are often omitted, downplayed or even directly silenced. Additionally, despite the fact that Israel has killed journalists at a rate far higher than any other period in history, often with targeted attacks, this has not been addressed by legacy Canadian news outlets.

These criticisms have been a mainstay at The Catch. Now, they are the position of an official United Nations report. Francesca Albanese, the UN's Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, recently released Truth under the rubble: media in the time of genocide. The report, which will be formally presented to the UN Human Rights Council on October 26, concluded that Israel has committed "mediacide." Three "mutually reinforcing" factors have facilitated this result. First, a "systematic targeting of Palestinian media workers and media and telecommunications infrastructure," followed by Israel's strictly controlled media environment, concluded with a condemnation of the international press. Here is how the report describes the third causal aspect:

The role of influential international media and digital platforms in
reproducing Israeli narratives, marginalizing Palestinian voices, dehumanizing Palestinians, suppressing legitimate criticism of Israel and ignoring or recasting legal realities to obscure or legitimize conduct amounting to a genocide.

What's important in this report is its extremely high-level of detail and coverage. Albanese used, among other primary sources and interviews, 62 written submissions on media ecosystems in Europe, North America and Australia. In a footnote, Canada is explicitly noted as one of the countries covered by this material. With that context, the report repeatedly states that the news outlets examined were chosen for "presumed authoritativeness and objectivity." This includes both public and private news outlets. The New York Times, CNN, and the BBC receive specific mention.

So while Canadian news outlets are not mentioned by name, the trends and analysis described are directly applicable to them. With Canada listed as a country covered by the findings, and with the caveat of nominally trustworthy and legitimate, we can use the findings to gauge Canadian legacy news media's culpability.

For instance, the report explains that the New York Times "advises caution" when using descriptors like "genocide," or "ethnic cleansing" and journalists are only permitted in rare exceptions to use the word "Palestine." This pattern is largely reproduced in Canadian journalism. In November 2023, The Breach reported that CTV News forbade reporters to use "Palestine" and suppressed criticism of Israel. Even after Canada officially recognized Palestine as a country, legacy outlets have largely decided to not standardize its use in their reporting.

One particular passage in the report notes "unequal attribution of responsibility is matched by an unequal distribution of empathy." CBC News refused to describe the killing of Palestinians as "brutal" or "murderous" while using those words for other victims in foreign military actions. In another analysis, The Breach found that the National Post, Globe & Mail and Toronto Star repeatedly used "slaughter" to describe the Oct. 7 2023 attacks on Israelis, but never once used it to describe the killing of Palestinians.

Favouring Israel in reporting comes in many forms. Global News pulled critical stories in the summer of 2024. CBC News agreed to an Israeli censorship order. Israeli narratives are repeatedly favoured in CTV News' reporting, CBC News' reporting and explicitly in the National Post.

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By pairing Albanese's new report with excellent work by The Breach, The Maple and other independent outlets, a clear trend of culpability appears throughout Canada's news media ecosystem. Further, there is no excuse for these news outlets to claim ignorance. As has been shown, these reports have been public for years. Indeed, the UN report itself notes that the "patterns documented here persisted despite repeated warnings from journalists, courts and United Nations bodies, raising serious questions as to compliance with those obligations."

In the conclusion, Albanese notes that states can and should take action to stop this mediacide and support of genocide. Some of these measures include reviewing funding and partnerships with media organizations that are implicated. This obviously applies to the CBC, the public broadcaster for Canada, but the federal government also provides funds to private news organizations. These occur through multiple channels, including the Local Journalism Initiative, a $100 million deal with Google and the Canadian journalism labour tax credit.

Meanwhile, the only Western coverage I've seen of this report has come from The National out of Scotland. None of the outlets mentioned in this piece have reported on it. At this point, Canadian news media has not only helped Israel commit mediacide and covered for their genocide of Palestinians, they refuse to report that their role in doing so has been established by the UN.

Albanese's report specifically highlights how nominally trusted news media has twisted and distorted reality in order to cover for Israeli atrocities. While Canada's news media refuses to look itself in the mirror, Palestinian journalists continue to be the victim of a sustained and brutal pattern of killing by Israel. These journalists are targeted to further the genocide of their people as a whole.

Canadian media not only refuses to affirm solidarity with their slain colleagues, they've taken the side of their killers.