Looking closely at Figure 12, we can contextualize the Sympathy Ratio of the CBC, and demonstrate which other outlets are in close ideological proximity to it. In Figure 12, the scale of sympathy is at the top of the graph, with the center as the 1:1 balanced ratio. The CBC is part of a particular cluster of outlets - including the BBC - that hover around a 2-3:1 ratio. Innohives’ data analysis demonstrates that the CBC is more sympathetic toward Gaza than the BBC, but not as sympathetic as BBC Arabic. We believe that this is notable, as Figure 12 clearly reflects ideological alignment across media ecosystems: Arabic-language media overwhelmingly skews sympathetic to Gaza, while Jewish community outlets skew heavily toward Israel. The suggestion that the CBC is uniquely neutral, despite its clear positioning within this broader ideological landscape should not withstand critical scrutiny. Rather, its location on the chart reinforces the broader observation that all media outlets participate, to varying degrees, in narrative framing and partisan affect.
Taken together, these comparisons place the CBC among the more emotionally skewed of major public broadcasters during the first 4 months of the Israel-Hamas war. While its framing does not approach the extremes observed in explicitly partisan outlets, it aligns more closely with global patterns of Gaza-sympathetic framing than with the balanced posture expected of a publicly funded broadcaster operating under a formal mandate of impartiality.
Experiment and Results
(The Total 20 Month Reporting Timeframe):
Main Text Results and Analysis:
The initial reporting timeframe, analyzed previously, captures the first 4 months of the Israel-Hamas war. As we move forward and examine Innohives’ data and results from total 20 months of coverage by the CBC, henceforth referred to as the total reporting timeframe, the overall volume of coverage decreases, as shown in Figure 13. While coverage volume naturally declined over time, this does not affect Innohives’ proportional analysis. What matters is the relative frequency of sympathetic framing, not the number of reports - though both article count and sympathetic occurrences follow a predictable and expected down-ward trend in reporting in a longer conflict like this war.
As such, this section considers the proportion of sympathy over time, alongside our observations of key events such as ceasefires, military operations, and international developments. Unlike the initial reporting timeframe, this analysis is presented from month by month rather than week to week, to reflect the extended timeline and reduced coverage volume.
Sympathy Levels Over Time:
The number of articles gathered across the total reporting timeframe is 2789, including the 921 assessed during the initial reporting timeframe. That means that approximately 1/3 of all of the CBC’s online coverage of the Israel-Hamas war over the course of 20 months was done during the first 4 months of war, compared to the 2/3 done over the course of 16 months. Using the same methodology and queries as before, Innohives found 796 sympathetic occurrences for Israel and 1,595 for Gaza in the main texts - a ratio of 2.004, or 2:1.
Actor-Level Proportions, Grouping Effects, and Civilian-Militant Framing:
As shown in Figures 14 and 15, Innohives’ data indicates that the sympathy rate of Palestinian people remained the highest of all six categories throughout the total timeframe (around 0.65-0.7 on average), followed by Gaza. The same pattern observed in the early months is continued here: Palestinian civilians were portrayed most sympathetically, with Israeli categories grouped lower and closely aligned with Hamas. We noted key moments during the 16-month period of war to explore whether specific events corresponded to changes in sympathetic framing based on Innohives’ data.
As Figure 14 demonstrates, sympathetic framing toward Palestinian civilians remains around the same level (around 0.65) in the main texts from the initial reporting timeframe and total reporting timeframe, thus across the 20 months. By contrast, sympathy for Israeli civilians fell from just over 0.4 during the initial period (see Figure 3) to about 0.3 (see Figure 14). Meaning fewer than 1 in 3 reports portrayed Israeli civilians sympathetically. Per Figure 16, the main text Gaza:Israel ratio diverged furthest from balance (1:1) in May 2024 and again in April 2025.
This sustained divergence is further contextualized by the Militancy Ratio calculated over the full reporting period. Using the same methodology applied to the initial timeframe, Innohives found a Militancy Ratio of 0.408 across the 20 months. Although slightly lower than the 0.449 observed in the first four months, this figure indicates that nearly half as much sympathetic framing was extended to militant actors as to civilians throughout the total period. Taken together, these results show that the asymmetries observed early in the conflict did not dissipate over time, but remained structurally embedded in CBC’s coverage.
Notable Deviations in Sympathy Patterns:
As illustrated in Figure 15, there are points in the results where the Sympathy Ratios are notable. First is the month of May 2024, where the ratio of sympathetic occurrences is higher for Hamas than it is for Israel and the IDF, with the ratio for Israeli civilians only slightly higher than that of Hamas. In June and July 2024, the sympathy for the IDF and Hamas were aligned. Additionally, around the 1-year mark of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the sympathy for Israeli civilians nearly aligns with that of Israel overall, but the discrepancy between Palestinian civilians and Gaza, and especially Hamas, is disparate.
In March of 2025, we observed similar results in the data to that of May 2024: the sympathy for Israel and the IDF is lower than that of Hamas. In both instances, the sympathy for Israeli civilians is just barely above that of Hamas. Once again, overall, we observed a grouping wherein Palestinian civilians and Gaza are similarly sympathetically aligned, with Hamas dramatically lower - best observed in Figure 15 - but all 3 Israel categories are similarly grouped sympathetically alongside Hamas (with a few exceptions across the timeline, see Figure 14).
We noted that May of 2024 stands out as a turning point in coverage (see Figures 13 and 15). Sympathy toward Gaza peaked that month, with over 150 sympathetic occurrences in 221 articles - coinciding with international events that intensified criticism of Israel, such as the ICC’s arrest warrant request for Israeli leaders, the launch of Israel’s Rafah offensive, and several nations’ recognition of a Palestinian state.27282930 Early the following month (June 2024), 4 Israeli hostages were rescued from Nuseirat camp, including Noa Argamani, who had become one of the main faces of the hostage crisis.31 Notably, the sympathy for Israeli civilians across that 2-month period in Innohives’ dataset remains stagnant.
We assess that these sustained disparities demonstrate not just momentary fluctuations or exceptions, but a consistent qualitative imbalance in CBC’s coverage over time.
Headline Results & Analysis:
Headlines Sympathy Levels Over Time:
As with the initial reporting timeframe, Innohives analyzed headlines using the same 6 queries. Examining headlines across the total reporting period demonstrates how the CBC’s editorial framing evolved over time, wherein we observed that some early trends held and others expanded.
Out of all articles analyzed across the total reporting timeframe, 1,043 cases within headlines that were flagged as sympathetic. Innohives calculated the Sympathy Ratio for headlines in the total reporting timeframe by taking the sympathetic occurrences for Gaza, 864, and divided it by the number of sympathetic occurrences for Israel, 179, resulting in a headlines Sympathy Ratio of 4.827, rounded to 4.83. This is an increase from the analysis of the initial 4 months of war (with the headline ratio of 3.09) indicating that the CBC’s headline framing became more emotionally skewed toward Gaza over time.
Civilian Emphasis and Headline Framing:
While the percentage of sympathetic headlines are similarly low across the initial and total reporting timeframes, Figure 17 illustrates how the ratio of sympathetic occurrences across the 6 queries is skewed. The sympathy average for Israeli people, for example, neither reaches nor exceeds 0.1, yet Palestinian people & Gaza have a ratio of around 0.3. In the initial reporting timeframe, the category of Israeli people breached 0.1; conversely, it remains below that for the entire reporting timeframe.
This trend we observed in the headlines is best demonstrated in Figures 17 and 18, which convey the proportion of headlines each month that were flagged as sympathetic for each actor across 3 categories over the 20 months. As with the initial 4 months and with the main text total reporting timeframe, we observed that sympathy for Israeli people is aligned with sympathy for the country itself, its army, and Hamas. Once again, Palestinian people and Gaza are framed distinctly from the terrorist group that governs their territory, while seemingly no such consideration is applied to Israeli civilians.
The Militancy Ratio and trends in the headlines across the total 20 months demonstrate that civilian narratives, particularly for Palestinian civilians, framed the CBC’s reporting but that once again, this emphasis is not applied across all actors or consistently insulated from broader narrative alignments.
Comparing Main Texts and Headlines:
Innohives compare the distribution of sympathy across the flagged articles in the total reporting timeframe, demonstrated with pie charts as done in the previous section. For the main text (Figure 19), the distribution of non-sympathetic occurrences remains around 30% across both timeframes. However, there was a decrease in the percentage of sympathetic coverage that spans both Gaza and Israel (from 27.1% to 18.5%, the turquoise in Figure 19). Compared to the initial reporting timeframe, there is a 6% increase of coverage that is sympathetic toward Gaza, and 0.3% decrease in main text sympathy toward Israel.
For the headlines, Figure 20 demonstrates Innohives’ finding a 2% increase in the number of headlines with no sympathetic occurrences (the grey in Figure 20). There was a decrease while sympathetic headlines toward Israel decreased around 3% and increased toward Gaza by 2%. Note that the percentage of headlines that were sympathetic toward both Gaza and Israel was already small (1.2%) in the initial reporting timeframe. In the total 20 months, this distribution is even smaller: 0.5% across the total 20 months of war.
Overall, we observe that across Innohives’ data of the total reporting timeframe, sympathetic framing toward Gaza and Palestinians increased in both headlines and main texts, while sympathy toward Israel overall declined. As with the initial reporting timeframe, while most headlines remained neutral (about 2/3; see Figure 20), when headlines were sympathetic, they overwhelmingly favoured Gaza. As with the initial reporting timeframe, headline sympathy was increasingly misaligned, reinforcing a binary of applied sympathy.
We want to emphasize that in March 2025, no Israeli category registered sympathetic framing in the headlines, while the Hamas headline Sympathy Ratio marginally exceeded that of all 3 “Israel” categories. Across the January-March 202532 ceasefire period, Innohives’ dataset provided us with the context that sympathy towards Hamas reached its peak in both headlines and main texts. For us, this period illustrates how changes in on-the-ground conditions corresponded with shifts in editorial framing.
Sympathy Alignment and Agreement in Main Texts and Headlines:
As previously conducted for the initial reporting timeframe, Innohives also calculated the Sympathy Ratio across headlines and main texts for the full 20 months, to determine, when sympathy shows up in headlines, how much also shows up in the article body. As demonstrated in Figure 21, the Sympathy Ratios over time are higher for Gaza, from 0.52 in the initial reporting timeframe, and 0.57 in the total reporting timeframe. Israel’s ratio fell from 0.26 in the initial reporting timeframe, and 0.22 in the total reporting timeframe.
We can thus conclude as we observed in the initial 4 months: that the headlines and main texts sympathetic to Gaza tended to be more consistent with one another, whereas sympathy for Israel in the main texts rarely carried into the headlines. We conclude that the CBC was more emotionally consistent toward Palestinians than for Israel. The CBC’s headlines in Innohives’ dataset demonstrate its editorial framing bias, and this bias grew more prominent over time.
The second metric measures all-or-nothing alignment by creating a sympathy agreement rate, asking: in a given month, how often do headlines and main texts agree on sympathy?
The average sympathy agreement rates Innohives calculated are as follows: for Gaza 0.53, an increase from 0.49 during the initial reporting timeframe; for Israel, the average remains at 0.17 across both datasets. As demonstrated in Figure 22, in more than half of the articles there was agreement between the headline and the article for Gaza, whereas only for 1 out of 6 articles was there sympathy agreement for Israel.
