Figure 23 demonstrates that the Sympathy Ratio for the CBC’s headlines (the dashed black line) remains consistently higher than that of the main text throughout the reporting period. Of particular note are the spikes. Because these are monthly averages, the surge observed during the initial reporting timeframe (see Figure 8, week of November 4, 2023) does not appear here. Note a few periods in Figure 23: February 2024 shows a headline

Sympathy Ratio nearing 40 to 1, followed by 10 to 1 in May 2024, 15 to 1 in July 2024, 30 to 1 in March 2025, and 15 to 1 in April 2025. In plain terms, at times, for every 1 headline sympathetic to Israel, there were between 10 to 40 sympathetic to Gaza. As Figure 13 demonstrates, the number of articles per month across the total reporting timeframe varied, though generally remained lower as the war progressed. For comparison, during the first four months of the war, BBC Arabic exhibited a headline Sympathy Ratio of approximately 6 to 1, comparable to Al Jazeera.33 By contrast, the CBC’s peaks far exceed those found in any other sympathy analysis of Israel–Hamas war coverage to date - something we conclude is notable for a publicly-funded news entity.

This is an important statistic, as headlines condense complex narratives into a few words designed to capture attention and readership. This is not inherently problematic; many headlines in our Innohives’ dataset were neutral (see Figure 19). However the consistent disparity in sympathetic framing indicates, once again, a tendency to use emotional framing when reporting about Gaza, but not with Israel. That divergence is significant, given that many readers engage only with the headlines. Put plainly, if a reader’s only exposure to the war was through the CBCs headlines, they would receive a more biased perspective - according to the above data - than readers of any other broadcaster analyzed to date.

Critically, the average headline’s Gaza:Israel Sympathy Ratio of 4.83 to 1 understates the magnitude of observable divergences at specific points in time. A 40:1 ratio observed 5 months into the conflict shows that the CBC’s editorial framing was not merely imbalanced but periodically overwhelming in one direction. This speaks to deliberate editorial effect and shapes how Canadians encountered and emotionally interpreted the war.

These findings mirror those of the initial reporting timeframe but with stronger divergence. Based on the data and results from the total reporting timeframe, we infer that the CBC consistently framed stories with sympathetic cues toward Palestinians and followed through on that framing in the full text, but sympathetic framing toward Israel was rarer and less consistent. Simultaneously, the CBC’s high militancy ratio indicates that sympathy extended to militant entities nearly half as often as to civilians, complicating the appearance of purely humanitarian framing expected in the Canadian context and in the trends observed in other metrics.

Discussion:

This report was the synthesis of Innohives’ AI-driven sympathy analysis of the CBC’s online coverage of the Israel-Hamas war over the course of 20 months, with a separate analysis of the first 4 months of coverage. Through their data and results, we established a pattern of sympathetic coverage of Israel and Gaza, and their respective militant and civilian groups, during both the early months of, and total 20 months of wartime reporting.

Innohives’ research and results are not prescriptive. The conclusion of our observations based on their data is not that one should not feel “sympathy, or report sympathetically, for a particular side of a conflict. But in reporting on a conflict, it is crucial to provide impartial and balanced media that reflects sympathy for both sides in a conflict, [and] provides the public with fair, accurate and honest information.”34 Thus measuring the sympathetic framing on either side of a given conflict “encapsulates the essence of the coverage's degree of bias and partiality.”35

It is important to clarify how bias is understood within the scope of this report. The presence of sympathy, or differences in the level of sympathy between parties, does not in itself constitute bias, nor does balanced reporting require symmetry in emotional framing. Differences in suffering, context, and developments on the ground are expected to produce differences in tone. The analytical concern addressed here is whether sympathy is applied consistently across actors and reporting layers under comparable conditions. Within this framework, bias emerges not from sympathy itself, but from systematic differences in how similar sympathetic signals are treated editorially depending on the actor involved.

Our observations based on the data and results from the initial reporting timeframe indicated that sympathy for Gaza and its militant and civilian counterparts was generally higher than that of Israel and its counterparts. Importantly, during the first week of coverage, the data conveyed a higher Sympathy Ratio for Israel than Gaza in the main texts. This reversed the following week (and remained distinct from thereon out), indicating that Innohives’ methodology responded to changing contexts.

Again, the finding that a higher Sympathy was expressed towards Gaza compared to Israel is not used as an evidence for unbalanced coverage; nor is the Sympathy Ratio that increased across the total reporting timeframe from 1.59 to 2.00 with the amount of civilian suffering in Gaza.

However, while the circumstances around Gaza and civilian suffering can be attributed to the level of sympathy in the main texts, the sympathy levels in the headlines tell a different story. As we noted, the standard editorial process follows that a journalist pens an article, and an editorial team/editor revises and titles said article. But rather than reflecting the sympathy in a given article, the data indicated that sympathy in the headlines was, while less likely to be present compared to articles themselves, almost always skewed toward Gaza, rarely reflecting the nuanced sympathy toward both categories or singular sympathy toward Israel.

This practice became more notable in the total 20 months of coverage. Innohives’ data provided a Sympathy Ratio of 3.09 for the headlines during the first 4 months. For the total 20 months, that ratio rose to 4.83. These ratios do not tell the full story, particularly of surges in certain monthly periods, which reflects how the CBC’s sympathetic framing re-sponded to events on the ground during the war.

Crucially, the headline findings cannot be explained by differences in suffering alone. Across the dataset, sympathetic framing toward Israel that was present in article bodies was significantly less likely to be carried into headlines, whereas sympathetic framing toward Gaza was far more consistently reinforced at the headline level. This asymmetry was observed even during periods where sympathetic signals were present for both sides in the main text. This disparity in the results suggests a consistent editorial framing by the CBC. No single finding or Sympathy Ratio demonstrates the CBC’s imbalance in its coverage. The fact that all of the numbers, patterns and metrics observed in the data repeatedly affirm that Israel was treated differently than Gaza, is what demonstrates the CBC’s partiality.

The purpose of Innohives’ analysis was to quantify the CBC’s sympathetic framing as a proxy for estimating the CBC’s commitment to its standards and practices. Based on its findings, we believe it is important to review the CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices, particularly its standards for coverage of “War, Terror and Natural Disasters.”

The CBC makes it clear that its coverage of war and disasters aims to reflect the realities on the ground through transparent means and perspectives, through coverage of all sides over time, while prioritizing “compassion” toward victims, exercising “judgement”36 and “restraint.” The sympathy patterns we observe in Innohives’ study can be considered in relation to these principles, particularly, as the Ombudsman laid out in 2014, the expectation that balance emerges across the full breadth of coverage over time.

There is an overlap in the CBC’s stated standards and practices, and elements of the theoretical framework of peace journalism, originally proposed by Johan Galtung as a journalistic approach that replaces more traditional war/violence-oriented journalism for reporting in conflict.37 Peace journalism includes key traits such as proactive reporting - particularly on the causes and consequences of conflict - attention to both visible and in-visible harms, avoidance of partisan or dichotomous framing, giving voice to all parties, especially marginalized voices, and emphasizing solutions, reconciliation, and post-conflict recovery.38

Kelling and Horvit (2017) describe how “[r]eporting on the here and now [of a conflict] is not enough to educate and inform public opinion; conflict coverage should involve dismissing the notion of being a reactionary journalist and instead telling a story providing historical context from all sides of the conflict.”

Through this lens, the CBC’s reporting on the Israel-Hamas war can be examined to appraise its character as context-sensitive or reactive. Peace journalism is introduced not as an orientation the CBC explicitly endorses or adopts, but as a comparative analytical lens we can use to discuss observed patterns of reporting and emotional framing. The question at hand is how can we characterize the CBC’s observed patterns of reporting when contrasted with the principles of people-oriented, proactive conflict journalism?

For example, the Militancy Ratio demonstrates sympathetic coverage of militant entities that was close to half of the sympathetic framing for civilian entities. On its own, this pattern may or may not align with the people-oriented approach of peace journalism. However, it is important to note that these two militant entities are not symmetrical. While the IDF is a state military, Hamas is a Canadian-designated terrorist organization. This fact is relevant to any analysis of our dataset and resulting patterns, especially as we are considering a publicly-funded Canadian broadcaster that is meant to operate within the national framework and in citizens’ best interests.

The discrepancy between Innohives’ civilian average rates challenges the interpretation of the militancy ratio that suggests a peace journalism orientation. In proactive, people-oriented journalism, relative stability in treatment of civilians is expected. In Innohives’ dataset of CBC articles over the course of the 4 months of war, Israeli people had an average just slightly below 0.4, compared to Palestinian people at just below 0.7. Over the total reporting timeframe, the number remained the same for Palestinian people but dipped to just under 0.3 for Israeli people. Recall that the weekly average during the first week of war had both civilian groups at a similar sympathy rate, but that a divergence - wherein Palestinian people and Gaza grouped together remain at a higher rate - occurred the following week, sustained over both reporting timeframes. This sustained disparity is indicative of an asymmetry in how civilian suffering was emotionally framed by the CBC over time.

Certain periods across both of Innohives’ datasets saw notable changes to sympathet-ic framing, like the week of December 2, 2023 in the initial reporting timeframe, and the months of March 2024 and May 2025. Also relevant are the headline results, particularly across the total reporting timeframe. While the Gaza:Israel headline Sympathy Ratio across the total reporting period was 4.83, this average obscures substantial month-to-month variation. In particular, several periods show extreme divergences in headline framing, such as February 2024 (40:1) and March 2025 (30:1), indicating that the overall ratio masks sharper episodic imbalances in editorial treatment.

Altogether, three patterns emerge from these results: (1) civilian sympathy rates diverged from their initial symmetry into a sustained discrepancy, (2) period-to-period ratios were not stable, with certain intervals exhibiting pronounced shifts, and (3) headline framing consistently privileged sympathy toward Gaza regardless of whether such sympathy was present in the main text. Taken together, these patterns suggest a mode of reporting that shifts responsively with developments on the ground, but does so unevenly across actors and reporting layers.

Kelling and Horvit suggest that a shift in journalism practices and standards, particularly in conflict coverage, is needed to produce “news that illuminates rather than provokes.”40 In the framework of peace journalism that they explore, the full context of a conflict is considered when reporting on said conflict. This mirrors the CBC’s standards and practices that hold conflict coverage should be accurate, providing full context, which includes seeking out perspectives that may be underreported and more sensitive.