Second, the underrepresentation of Israeli civilians creates a vacuum in the narrative ecosystem. Without first-person perspectives, audiences may struggle to understand the civilian stakes for Israelis: the fear of constant rocket fire, the trauma of October 7th, the pain of hostage families, the many thousands who were displaced from their homes, or the daily impact of war on ordinary lives. This absence flattens Israeli society into a monolith and, even if inadvertent, aligns Israeli civilian identity with the state or military, making it more difficult for audiences to distinguish between government policy and individual experience. In contrast, the consistent amplification of Palestinian civilian voices allows for the construction of a more complex, emotionally resonant portrait of life in Gaza. For Israelis, life was portrayed as ‘business as usual’, but Palestinian civilians were painted as the primary moral subjects of the conflict - the central locus of human suffering and compassion through which the war was understood.

Finally, this disparity underscores the importance of contextualizing any media coverage with deeper narrative analysis. Numerical data tells a clear story of uneven civilian representation, but the meaning of that story emerges only when we consider how these representations - or their absence - shape broader public perceptions. A comprehensive media analysis must attend not only to what is measured, but to what those measurements reveal about editorial priorities, moral framing, and the politics of empathy.

In sum, the CBC’s treatment of civilian voices in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war reflects a significant imbalance. While Palestinian perspectives were widely and consistently included, Israeli civilian narratives were comparatively rare, particularly in the later stages of the conflict. This editorial asymmetry is not merely a matter of statistics, it is a powerful force in shaping how audiences understand, emotionally engage with, and morally evaluate the events unfolding in the region. As such, the implications of these representational patterns extend well beyond journalistic practice and into the realm of cultural perception. As Canada’s national public broadcaster, the CBC occupies a uniquely powerful position in shaping how Canadians see and emotionally relate to global conflicts, and is thus governed by both its Journalistic Standards and Practices and the Broadcasting Act. Under this statutory framework, the CBC is obligated to provide programming that is fair, accurate, and reflective of the circumstances and experiences of all Canadians, including those affected by international conflicts. Moreover, its coverage is not merely descriptive; it is constitutive, helping to define the moral and emotional vocabulary through which Canadians interpret world events. When that coverage systematically humanizes one population while rendering another abstract or invisible, it raises serious questions about whether the CBC is meeting its mandate to reflect reality in a manner that is representative and balanced in substance, not merely in form. When one population’s suffering is continuously foregrounded and humanized, while another’s is abstracted or silenced, audiences are subtly conditioned to empathize asymmetrically. Over time, such selective empathy can crystallize into moral certainty: a conviction that one side represents the human face of tragedy while the other represents power, policy, or culpability. This process is not only sociological but civic. The CBC’s narrative framing helps to set the tone for how Canadian institutions - educational, cultural, and political - understand and discuss Israel and Gaza. It also influences how Canadians perceive their own moral obligations, their country’s foreign policy stance, and the boundaries of acceptable opinion within public discourse.

At a deeper level, this dynamic illustrates how media framing contributes to the formation of national identity itself. In a multicultural democracy like Canada, where the CBC is tasked with reflecting the nation’s diversity and fostering shared understanding, narrative imbalance in coverage of Israel and Gaza risks more than simple misrepresentation; it shapes collective empathy and belonging. A public broadcaster entrusted with serving all Canadians bears a heightened responsibility to avoid framing practices that implicitly privilege some forms of suffering while marginalizing others, particularly when those practices affect how minority communities experience recognition, legitimacy, and safety in the public sphere. When Israeli civilians appear only fleetingly, as distant purveyors of tragedy, and Palestinian civilians become the sustained moral reference point of compassion, Canadian audiences are invited into a moral geography that privileges one form of human suffering over another. This selective visibility has real social consequences: it informs how Jewish Canadians, Muslim Canadians, and others experience the public sphere; it affects intercommunal relations, shapes campus and workplace debates, and influences how young Canadians come to see Israel, Gaza, and by extension, themselves in relation to the global narrative of justice and oppression. In this way, the question raised by this analysis is not merely whether the CBC’s coverage was persuasive or impactful, but whether it fulfilled the public trust embedded in its mandate to inform, enlighten, and reflect Canadian society in all its complexity. In this sense, CBC’s editorial framing does not simply reflect public sentiment, it helps to manufacture it, reinforcing patterns of empathy and alienation that ripple outward into Canadian civic life.

Militant and Armed Actors:

The CBC’s own Journalistic Standards and Practices include a revealing and often publicly overlooked directive: “Our conflict reporting should contribute to an understanding of the reality on the ground, and tell the stories of the combatants and the people affected by the fighting.” On the surface, this appears to be a call for completeness and context. In practice, however, it carries real risks. Armed groups do not speak neutrally about their actions or motivations; they actively craft messages designed to justify violence, shape public sympathy, and advance political goals. When journalists present the perspectives of combatants as personal “stories,” without strong critical framing, they risk amplifying those messages rather than merely explaining them. In effect, reporters can become unintended carriers of propaganda or political messaging, lending emotional credibility to narratives that are strategically produced. This does not require bad faith or intent on the part of journalists; it is a structural risk inherent in treating militant actors as narrative subjects rather than as sources whose claims must be rigorously contextualized, challenged, and constrained.

The questions raised by this approach are not abstract. When journalists choose to tell the “stories” of combatants, a series of consequential decisions follow. Which fighters are given narrative depth and personal voice, and which remain anonymous or collective figures such as “militants,” “soldiers,” or “gunmen”? Are all armed actors treated as equally understandable moral subjects, or are some humanized through personal background and emotional detail while others are described only in institutional or functional terms?

When CBC elevates the account of a combatant, it must also confront a difficult but unavoidable tension: the same story can simultaneously help audiences understand conditions on the ground and advance the strategic or political messaging of the armed group involved. These outcomes are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they often coexist. The question, therefore, is not whether a combatant’s story informs or persuades (it likely does), but how journalists distinguish between contextual reporting and the uncritical transmission of a group’s preferred narrative. This challenge is especially acute in asymmetric conflicts, where one side represents a state military and the other is an armed non-state actor with a well-documented media strategy.

In this report we are not attempting to adjudicate the legal or moral status of any armed organization, nor to relitigate whether Hamas meets the definition of a terrorist group (it is, in fact, a listed terrorist entity in Canada). Nor are we singling out one set of combatants for scrutiny while exempting others. The concern applies broadly: any time journalists amplify the narratives of armed actors - whether Hamas, the IDF, or any other fighting force - those narratives must be treated with caution, context, and critical distance. Armed groups, by definition, seek to justify violence, legitimize their actions, and shape public perception. Reporting that reproduces their language, framing, or self-presentation without sustained interrogation risks serving those aims, even unintentionally.

This risk is heightened when combatant storytelling occurs alongside well-documented practices that raise serious ethical concerns including the use of child soldiers, embedding military infrastructure within civilian spaces such as hospitals and schools, diverting resources from civilian protection toward military objectives, or violently suppressing internal dissent. Acknowledging these realities does not require journalists to editorialize, but it does require them to avoid presenting combatant narratives as morally neutral or emotionally equivalent to civilian testimony. When fighters are framed as “storytellers,” their accounts can begin to carry the same emotional weight as those of civilians, a move that blurs the line between explaining a conflict and normalizing or softening the violence that sustains it.

Emphasizing combatant narratives also shapes how civilian suffering is understood. When armed actors become central narrators, they influence how audiences interpret who is a victim, who is responsible, and whose grievances are legitimate. In some cases, this can crowd out civilian voices altogether, or reframe civilian harm as an unfortunate but understandable byproduct of justified struggle. Over time, this shifts the moral centre of the coverage. Civilian testimony becomes one perspective among many, rather than the ethical anchor of war reporting.

For these reasons, the CBC’s commitment to “telling the stories of combatants” is not a neutral journalistic principle. It is a powerful narrative choice with real consequences. How those stories are selected, framed, contextualized, and challenged matters deeply, not only for public understanding of the conflict, but for the moral boundaries that journalism helps set around violence, responsibility, and human dignity.

Case Study:

A clear example of how CBC’s reporting can humanize militant actors, and thereby blur the moral distinctions between civilians, armed groups, and state forces, appears in its article Israel's military has turned its sights on Jenin refugee camp following deadly Hamas attacks in December 2023.26 From its opening lines, the article constructs Jenin not merely as a site of conflict but as a place imbued with symbolic meaning and emotional resonance: children “dance around you like fireflies,” guiding the reporter through the aftermath of Israeli raids. This literary framing positions the camp itself as a character, and its inhabitants as sympathetic innocents, before introducing any political or military context. The description of young men pictured “posing with guns” is not accompanied by critical interrogation; rather, it is embedded in a narrative of youthful vitality and communal identity. Such imagery sets the tone for the article’s treatment of militants as locally rooted, socially embedded actors - almost folkloric figures within the camp’s struggle.

The article’s portrayal of militant groups and their sympathizers goes beyond neutral reportage to create a morally legible landscape in which Palestinian armed actors appear as organic extensions of communal life. The reference to boys in Jenin as the “firefly brigade”—a term presented with-out critique—functions rhetorically to recast militant identity as childlike, spontaneous, and even endearing. When a 15-year-old killed during clashes (and later identified by Hamas themselves as one of their fighters) is described as someone who “could easily have been claimed” by this brigade, the effect is to normalize the integration of armed identity into Palestinian adolescence and to recast militant affiliation as a form of innocent belonging rather than a political or violent choice. The narrative thus blurs the crucial distinction between civilians and combatants, framing armed resistance not as an organized militant effort but as a natural expression of youth and community. This is precisely the kind of narrative move that transforms combatants into “moral subjects” - figures whose emotional world is foregrounded and whose actions are implicitly contextualized or softened through storytelling.