CBC Coverage of the Israel–Hamas War: Artificial Intelligence Sympathy Analysis

(October 2023 – June 2025)

Executive Summary:

As Canada’s national public broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) plays a central role in shaping how Canadians understand international events. That role carries not only influence but responsibility. Unlike private media organizations, the CBC is a publicly funded institution bound by legal and institutional obligations to provide news coverage that is fair, balanced, and impartial, and is therefore subject to a higher degree of public accountability.

Evaluating how these obligations are reflected in coverage of a prolonged and politically sensitive conflict such as the Israel-Hamas war presents a methodological challenge. For example, the volume and duration of the CBC’s coverage during the Israel-Hamas war make it challenging to assess systematic reporting patterns through qualitative analysis alone.

This report presents a quantitative analysis of CBC News’ online coverage of the Israel-Hamas war conducted by Innohives using advanced AI-driven narrative analysis, capable of examining how reporting practices operate across thousands of articles over extended time periods. Innohives is a research-led company composed of senior scientists and quantitative researchers with expertise in computational modelling, large-scale data analysis, and artificial intelligence. Its analytical frameworks have been publicly tested in prior assessments of public broadcasters, including the world’s largest public broadcaster, the BBC (see Asserson Report), and are designed to meet established standards of transparency, reproducibility, and methodological rigor.

At the core of the analysis is the Sympathy Ratio benchmark, a descriptive measure developed by Innohives to quantify narrative emphasis in news coverage. The benchmark captures how frequently reporting evokes sympathy toward different actors in a conflict, enabling structured, longitudinal comparison of narrative patterns across large volumes of coverage.

Using this benchmark, the analysis examines whether and how sympathetic narratives are allocated within CBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Particular attention is paid to variation across time, differences between headlines and full articles, and shifts across reporting contexts. The analysis is descriptive, rather than prescriptive, and does not assume that impartial journalism requires equal sympathy across all sides. The purpose is to support empirical assessment of the CBC’s coverage in light of its public mandate.

Methodology:

This analysis examines 2,789 CBC News articles and headlines published between October 7, 2023 and June 7, 2025. Each article and headline was reviewed by a Large Language Model (LLM) tasked with identifying whether a given text expresses sympathy toward any of 6 actors: Israel, Gaza, Israeli civilians, Palestinian civilians, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and Hamas. The model’s task is limited to detecting sympathetic portrayal and attributing it to the relevant actor. It does not assess factual accuracy, editorial quality, or intent.

It is expected that different news items portray events and actors with varying narrative emphases. Each news outlet inevitably constructs its own representation of reality, and the purpose of this methodology is not to evaluate the legitimacy of those representations, but to describe and quantify them.The primary measure used for this purpose is the Sympathy Ratio Benchmark, which measures how frequently sympathy is expressed toward one actor compared with another. In simple terms, the benchmark counts how many times coverage conveyed sympathy toward each side and compares those counts. If sympathy toward one actor appears twice as often as toward another within the same set of articles, the resulting Sympathy Ratio is 2:1. This provides a straightforward way to describe narrative emphasis without making claims about what journalistic coverage should look like.

After establishing the Sympathy Ratio, the analysis examines how sympathy allocation varies across time, between headlines and full articles, and across different reporting contexts. It is conducted over two timeframes: the first 4 months of coverage following October 7, 2023, and the full 20-month period through June 7, 2025. This approach enables both short-term comparison with prior broadcaster analyses and longer-term assessment of narrative change.

The methodology does not rely on subjective human interpretation. It is transparent, reproducible, and supports clear, evidence-based examination of narrative patterns employed by public broadcasters.

KEY FINDINGS:

• Headlines displayed greater sympathy asymmetry than article body text: During the first 4 months of coverage, Sympathy Ratios were higher in headlines than in main text (headlines: 3.09; main text: 1.59).

• Headline-level sympathy asymmetry increased over time: The Sympathy Ratio in CBC headlines rose from approximately 3 in the initial 4 months to approximately 5 across the full 20-month period - meaning for every 1 headline with sympathy for Israel, nearly 5 were sympathetic toward Gaza.

• Alignment between headlines and articles differed by actor: Articles expressing sympathy toward Gaza were substantially more likely to have corresponding sympathetic headlines than articles expressing sympathy toward Israel.

• Sympathetic framing toward Gaza remained higher than toward Israel over time: Across both article body text and headlines, Gaza received more sympathetic framing than Israel at nearly all timepoints, with the exception of the first week following October 7th, 2023.

• Sympathetic framing of militant actors occurred at roughly half the rate of civilian framing: For approximately every 2 instances of sympathetic coverage involving civilians (Israeli and Palestinian combined), 1 instance of sympathetic coverage occurred toward a militant actor (IDF and Hamas combined). This “Militancy Ratio” is higher than observed in other news outlets, including public broadcasters such as the BBC.

• In comparative world media analysis, CBC’s Sympathy Ratio aligned with outlets leaning towards the Palestinian narrative, between BBC English and BBC Arabic: Notably, BBC Arabic has been the subject of parliamentary discussion in the UK regarding issues of impartiality, and the findings of the Asserson Report acted as a catalyst for the BBC’s acknowledgment of systemic bias concerns, followed by layoffs that reached senior leadership.

Conclusions:

This report illustrates how large-scale, AI-driven quantitative analysis can be used to examine the institutional behaviour of publicly funded media in a way that is not possible through isolated examples or selective case review. By operating across thousands of articles, multiple editorial layers, and extended timeframes, the analysis moves beyond individual reporting choices and toward an examination of systemic patterns of behavior.

For a publicly funded broadcaster operating under a mandate of fairness and impartiality, such analysis is particularly relevant. While this report does not offer determinations of compliance, it establishes a basis for informed scrutiny and comparative evaluation of the

CBC’s editorial practices. When coverage repeatedly narrows the emotional and narrative frame through which a conflict is presented, it risks promoting a shallow and one-dimen-sional moral reading rather than fostering context, complexity, and dialogue. Over time, this does not bring audiences closer to understanding or resolution; it hardens perceptions, deepens divisions, and moves public discourse further from the pluralistic values a public broadcaster is meant to uphold.

Introduction:

The Purpose of this Report:

This report examines the CBC’s online coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, beginning with Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israeli territory. It evaluates whether that coverage met the CBC’s own journalistic standards of accuracy, fairness, and impartiality, which are intrinsic to its role as a publicly-funded broadcaster meant to serve Canadians across the country.

The purpose of this report is to convey how the CBC’s online coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has been balanced in its reporting. Innohives applied AI-based methods to examine sympathy in the CBC’s online coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, starting with Hamas’ at-tack on October 7, 2023 until June 7, 2025, to assess the degree by which the CBC’s online reporting was balanced and proportionate in its emotional framing. By quantifying instances of sympathy toward 6 relevant actors - Israel, Gaza, Israeli civilians, Palestinian civilians, the IDF, and Hamas - Innohives’ research enables identification of observable patterns in how each side was represented over time.

In addition, this report includes a comparative element. In order to more accurately compare the CBC’s coverage to that of the BBC, as captured in The Asserson Report: The Israel-Hamas war and the BBC by Trevor Asserson and Dr. Haran Shani-Narkiss, Innohives separately analyzed the first 4 months of coverage, independently of the subsequent 20 months of coverage. Innohives’ data and results, and this report’s findings are intended to support dialogue and action about editorial consistency & responsibility, and the responsibilities of publicly-funded journalism in Canada in times of conflict that affect all Canadians.

As a publicly-funded institution, the CBC is more than a news outlet; it is one of Canada’s primary cultural storytellers. Its reporting helps define how Canadians understand global events, their national identity, and one another. Because of this, its commitment to the highest standards of fairness, balance, and impartiality is not simply a professional obligation but a moral and civic one. If the CBC seeks to act as a shaper of culture and a guardian of public trust, then it must ensure that the stories it tells - especially in moments of crisis - reflect accuracy, empathy, and equity for all communities.

The AI-based sympathy analysis was conducted by Innohives, led by Dr. Haran Shani-Narkiss, who produced the data, results, and charts in this report. All methodology development and data analysis were done without input or influence by HR Canada Charitable Organization, to maintain a high level of scientific rigor. Innohives was also responsible for the data analysis done in the Asserson Report, and the methodology conducted here closely follows the standard set in that study. Those wishing to know more about Innohives or how the data was treated in this study are encouraged to read the full Asserson Report.

Once gathered, the data and results provided by Innohives were synthesized into a report with commentary by HR Canada Charitable Organization, led by research analyst Layla Rudy.

The CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices:

Any fair analysis of a broadcaster’s bias and assessment of their adherence to their own journalistic standards must begin by understanding exactly what they, the broadcaster, understand those standards to be. A comprehensive overview of the CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices (JSP) is beyond the scope of this report, but we bring forth components of the JSP that we believe are relevant to our report’s goals and findings.

CBC’s Mission and Principles:

As stated in the introduction to the JSP, the CBC’s primary “mission is to inform, to reveal, to contribute to the understanding of issues of public interest.” This is underscored in their principle of Accuracy, which has the CBC’s commitment to “seek out the truth in all matters of public interest. We invest our time and our skills to learn, understand and clearly explain the facts to our audience. The production techniques we use serve to present the content in a clear and accessible manner.”

Other principles include Fairness - their commitment to treat those they interact with “with openness and respect” - and Balance, which requires the CBC to reflect a diversity of opinion on controversial issues, ensuring that differing but relevant views are represented respectfully and over a reasonable period of time.

In response to a complaint by Diane Weber Bederman, the CBC Ombudsman at the time, Esther Enkin, published “Covering Gaza: How do you judge balance and bias?” on October 7, 2014. Enkin was addressing the complaint by Bederman that the CBC’s coverage of the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict lacked “balance and context” and was biased against Israel - namely, it underreported Israeli perspectives and suffering, and failed to mention Hamas’ use of human shields. Enkin’s argument is that the CBC’s commitment to balance and fairness does not entail reporting in a manner that is tit-for-tat; her claim is that reporting cannot always be an equivalent portrayal of both sides at all times, but that over time and across all CBC coverage, balance is achieved.