In February, journalist Ginella Massa stood by a cluster of candles illuminating a banner while, one after another, the names of the journalists killed since the start of Israel’s bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip were read out. She was one of four organizers of a vigil on the campus of Toronto Metropolitan University that aimed to shine a light on mainstream Canadian media’s failure to hold Israel accountable. 

As one of the organizers, she reached out to numerous colleagues across the city, asking for solidarity. Massa said many told her that they wanted to attend, but feared backlash from their newsroom editors. “It is such a shame, and a bit of an indictment on the industry, that journalists would be afraid to attend a vigil for their fallen colleagues.”

Since October 7, mainstream Canadian journalists have struggled to cover the war on Gaza. Many of those who have attempted to explain the Palestinian experience, provide historical context, or include Palestinian voices in stories report being silenced or intimidated. 

Inside Canadian newsrooms, there’s been a backlash against those who have spoken up. Some journalists, particularly journalists of colour, have been targeted, harassed, and in some cases, had their jobs threatened. Others feel they’ve been pushed out of the industry.

Ricochet spoke to 10 Canadian journalists, media workers, and journalism educators who talked about what it’s been like trying to cover the story. They include reporters and broadcasters, editors, and producers at mainstream outlets, both local and national. Many requested anonymity, fearing repercussions from their current or future employers.

One Toronto Star journalist told Ricochet that coverage of Gaza has been at the root of significant discord in the newsroom, which they see as being divided along generational lines. “Part of the problem is the old guard,” the Star journalist said, pointing to “typical old-school journalists with their post-Cold War racist mentality” who are still in leadership positions.

Gaza now most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist

On July 31, yet another Palestinian journalist was killed by Israel. Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul and his cameraman, Rami al-Rifi, both aged 27, were killed following an air attack in the Al-Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza. Al-Ghoul was wearing a clearly labeled press flak vest when he was killed.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, nearly 75 per cent of journalists that were killed in 2023 died in Israel’s war on Gaza. That makes it the deadliest nine months for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.

In addition to documenting the growing tally of journalists killed and injured, CPJ’s research has found an array of assaults, threats, cyberattacks, censorship, and killings of family members as well. The committee is also investigating other reports about missing, detained, hurt, or threatened journalists as well as damage to media offices and journalists’ homes.

“There is a pattern of journalists in Gaza reporting receiving threats, and subsequently, their family members being killed,” the industry watchdog states. The 90-year-old father of the Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his home after multiple threats were made to his son. “The journalist told Al Jazeera that he had received multiple phone calls from officers in the Israeli army instructing him to cease coverage and leave northern Gaza. Additionally, he received voice notes on WhatsApp disclosing his location,” the CPJ said.

Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, has repeatedly emphasized the importance of protecting journalists in this crisis. He says that journalists across the region are sacrificing their lives to cover the ongoing conflict. “The Palestinian journalists have paid, and continue to pay, an unprecedented toll and face exponential threats. Many have lost colleagues, families, and media facilities, and have fled, seeking safety when there is no safe haven or exit.”

Journalist Pacinthe Mattar, another organizer of the February vigil in Toronto, adds: “It’s largely Palestinian journalists who have paid a cost that no journalist should have to by covering this war.”

Israel still blocking journalists from entering Gaza

A major challenge has been that journalists have been blocked from entering Gaza, with the exception of a handful who have been allowed to embed with Israeli military units.

Just last month, more than 70 mainstream media and civil society organizations — including CTV, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post — signed an open letter, coordinated by the Committee to Protect Journalists, urging Israel to give journalists independent access to Gaza. 

This week, journalist Jayne Secker at Sky News UK questioned an Israeli government spokesperson on this while interviewing him on live TV.

“More than 100 journalists have been killed since the start of the war and those who remain are working in conditions of extreme deprivation,” the letter states. “The result is that information from Gaza is becoming harder and harder to obtain and that the reporting which does get through is subject to repeated questions over its veracity.”

Palestinian journalists have been filling the gap with grisly and unflinching coverage from the ground, a genocide streaming to the world’s smartphones in a 24-hour live feed.

The price has been high.

The International Federation of Journalists says 116 journalists and media workers have been killed. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, the foremost organization for Palestinian reporters living and working in Palestine, counts 152 journalists killed. 

“Journalism is in the process of being eradicated in the Gaza Strip,” the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders has warned.

Yet 10 months into the war, much of the Canadian mainstream media is still largely silent regarding the overwhelming casualties of their colleagues in Gaza.

“It shouldn’t feel controversial to talk about press freedom and the violence that journalists are facing in any conflict,” Massa told Ricochet, adding that the organizers of the “Journalists for Journalists” vigil — freelance journalist Pacinthe Mattar, The Narwhal’s Fatima Syed, and The Local’s Inori Roy — were motivated to collectively fill that silence and provide a space to grieve. 

“We as journalists need to be able to say, this is enough, acknowledge that this is not okay, it has never been okay,” said Ravindra Mohabeer, chair of Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism. 

Palestinian voices censored

Canadian legacy media has struggled to maintain a veneer of objectivity, and that has led to conflict when staff of Palestinian and Middle Eastern descent attempt to speak out. Some staff have faced disciplinary actions for what their employers considered inappropriate public comments or advocacy.

Palestinian journalist Yara Jamal went public after she was fired from CTV in Halifax in December for organizing a rally in support of her Palestinian community. “CTV News fired me for speaking up for Palestine… I was the only Palestinian person in the media in the Atlantic region and the only Middle Eastern person in the newsroom.

“My firing took less than 24-hours after a Twitter thread labelling me anti-Semetic.”

It was a similar story at Global News in November, when the only Palestinian journalist, Zahraa Al-Akhrass, was fired after posting about Palestine on her personal social media feed. Her post expressed a strong critique of the State of Israel, and was picked up and shared by pro-Israel group Honest Reporting Canada, which launched a campaign directed at her employer.

“My employer told me that my posts about Palestine make me look unbalanced and that violates [Global News] policy,” she said in a TikTok. “I believe Western media is complicit in the genocide Israel is commiting of Palestinans.” 

Al-Akhrass says Canadian media does this by consistently presenting both sides of this issue as equals. “They are definitely not equal. One side is an Indigenous population living on their land trying to resist. The other is an occupying force.”

A Global News video editor who witnessed how the young journalist was treated told Ricochet that the company “completely disregarded” what Al-Akhrass was going through at the time, adding that the broadcaster “likes to maintain a neutral stance.” 

“No one talks about it, and no one really wants to get that deep in the conversation because people are fucking delusional. There’s empathy for Israeli children but none for Arabs. They just want to stick to a guideline and be neutral for viewers.” 

After Al-Akhrass’ termination, some staff at Global News started to self-censor. “I have producers on my social media, and after she was let go, I stopped talking about it [Palestine] because I am scared of losing my job,” the video editor said.

Global News did not respond to a request for comment.

A broadcast journalist at a mainstream outlet in Ottawa told Ricochet that rules around journalistic integrity are not enforced equally.

The journalist, who has been in the industry for about 10 years, said when it comes to Palestine, there’s a double standard regarding coverage and expressions of solidarity. “There were journalists that straight-up posted on their social media, ‘I stand with Ukraine,’ and nothing happened to them.”

And the double standard is far from new. In May 2021, shortly after Israel launched an assault on Sheikh Jarrah, killing 230 Palestinians and injuring at least 1,710, the CBC warned its journalists against using the word “Palestine” in their reporting. As a response, Canadian journalists penned and signed an open letter to Canadian newsrooms asking for “fair and balanced coverage” of the conflict. The letter was signed by more than 2,000 people, including prominent journalists, such as filmmaker Omar Mouallem, CTV’s Haneen Al-Hassoun, the Toronto Star’s Shree Paradkar, and former Globe and Mail podcast host Tamara Khandaker.

As a consequence of asking for fair coverage, some of the CBC journalists who signed the letter were taken off stories about Palestine “because their editors felt the reporters had exposed their bias,” explained Massa.

Muhannad Ayyash, professor of sociology at Mount Royal University, told Ricochet that mainstream Western media discourse dehumanizes, eliminates, and erases Palestinians as participants in the public dialogue.

For decades, he said, the Israeli state and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “have worked extremely hard to link all anti-colonial and anti-imperial discourse with fundamentalist Islamist ideology, and call that terrorism.” 

Ayyash said it’s not a coincidence that many of the world’s biggest colonial states — including the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. — have enabled Israel to carry out the current genocide of the Palestinian people. “It’s not surprising that the media in these countries does not push back on state interests and thereby utterly fails in its task to challenge that discourse,” he said. 

Things are getting tense in Canada’s newsrooms

Canadian media has been largely failing in its duty to correct misinformation and disinformation coming from official Israeli sources, said the Ottawa-based journalist. “It is our job to correct it.” 

At the Toronto Star, a veteran journalist says that it’s frustrating to see stories about Palestine and Palestinians often be “subject to only one senior white editor’s judgment.” Then, if that editor is sick, delays happen, sometimes to the point that a story loses its impact. “That’s censorship by delay.” 

Far more scrutiny is given to stories if it’s examining the atrocities committed by the IDF. Uncritical stories about Israel, however, face far fewer restrictions, the Star journalist says. “There’s an unprecedented level of control over pro-Palestine coverage.”

The Star did not respond to Ricochet’s questions.

Meanwhile, inside the CBC, a segment producer says the public broadcaster doesn’t “engage in an honest dialogue about Palestine, and in fact, [open] conversations about Palestine are suppressed.”

A handful of other mainstream reporters, including Arab and South Asian journalists who expressed criticism of their employers’ coverage of Palestine and Israel, also told Ricochet that they frequently feel othered, tokenized, gaslit, or diminished, or that their ethnicities amount to a “diversity quota,” as characterized by one Toronto journalist.

It’s rare to see a Palestinian interviewed live

There are other ways that mainstream Canadian media strategically censors the Palestinian perspective. For on-air Palestinian guests, the Ottawa-based journalist said the time allotted is often very short, the interview is almost never conducted live, and the guest is frequently interrupted. 

Mattar said Palestinians have been trying to cut through the propaganda and help mainstream journalists better understand the power dynamics and historical context. Even the framing of the issue by legacy media as “the Israel-Hamas war” erases the Palestinian perspective. 

“To be clear, wars transpire between two sovereign states and military powers; what’s happening in Palestine is unequal in the military campaign and it’s fundamentally unequal in the toll and the cost that is being paid [by the Palestinians],” said Mattar.

When it comes to Palestine, Mattar said that the mainstream media has consistently failed in basic principles of journalism, such as verification, accuracy, and context. “It may have started as Israel wanting to respond to Hamas for the attacks on October 7. What we saw after — it’s not a war against Hamas, but against all the Palestinian people.”

Diversity without inclusion

In its 2022 – 2025 Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Plan, CBC states, “We are committed to making sure that all people living in Canada feel valued, seen and heard by their public broadcaster.” However Ricochet heard a different story.

The segment producer at CBC, who is of Arab ethnicity, believes that “diversity is just another buzzword they use to gain social traction. When the producer tried to push for more contextual stories about Palestine, they were told the topic was “too complex” and to “find something else.” 

This meant not mentioning the context around the BDS movement or why people have been boycotting companies like Starbucks.

“Part of journalism is to provide the context and that that’s what they do — they pick and choose what kind of context they want to air and when do they want to air that context.”

“It makes you feel like you are the closest thing to it, but you’re still not credible,” they told Ricochet.

It was the last story they did about Palestine, after which their contract wasn’t renewed at the CBC.

CBC responded to Ricochet’s questions with a statement. “CBC News has covered and will continue to cover a wide range of stories around the conflict and its international ramifications.”

In recent years, mainstream newsrooms have made powerful statements championing diversity in the voices they cover, but this issue remains an exception to the rule — for example, by framing the issue as a religious conflict between Muslims and Jews, rather than showing systemic anti-Palestinian racism that impacts Palestinians of all religious identities.

“We [Palestinian Christians] feel completely erased from the [media] narrative and have to work extra hard to make it known that it is not a Muslim-Jewish issue, but one of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing,” said Hammam Farah, a Toronto-based Gazan therapist, who lost his 84-year-old great aunt, Elham Farah, in the genocide.

Mattar says it comes down to two things: mainstream media’s ignorance regarding religious diversity among Arabs, making it easy to ignore Arab-Christian groups. Also, it becomes easier to dismiss the violence if everyone is a monolith of “Muslims.”

Intimidation from pro-Israeli lobby groups

Those Canadian journalists who have attempted to bring more fairness to their coverage or amplify the voices and perspectives of Palestinians, frequently find themselves the subject of online campaigns aimed at their employer and calling for them to be fired. 

Suppression of pro-Palestinian voices and perspective is the goal of these viral smear campaigns, which are frequently led by extremely organized and well-funded pro-Israeli lobby groups. 

Almost everyone who spoke to Ricochet for this story has been targeted by one of these groups. 

Shenaz Kermalli, a freelance journalist and journalism professor, said that has led to a longstanding fear around discussing this issue.

That fear of being targeted by Honest Reporting Canada — the group that targeted Al-Akhrass — or Canary Mission, has certainly put the brakes on coverage. Newsrooms have expressed fear of losing current or potential funders, or the risks of having staff be harassed on social media. Multiple journalists told Ricochet that they’ve faced professional hurdles after particularly vicious campaigns led by these groups.

Kermalli recalled the time she was targeted by HRC after writing an op-ed for the Toronto Star with the headline “Hypocrisy in the Middle East.” As someone with a platform and some degree of privilege, she said, “It makes me want to fight harder.”

Ricochet reached out to HRC and Canary Mission for a comment but did not receive a response from either organization.

The intimidation is also felt by journalism instructors, Kermalli said. “It’s the same silence that I feel exists in journalism schools. There’s a deep level of discomfort that comes with discussing Palestine-Israel on campuses.”

In Canadian newsrooms, Mattar says reporters and editors must stand up to outside groups and do their duty to readers by telling the truth. 

“At the very minimum, there has to be a recognition within newsrooms that there has been a glaring problem for decades that we haven’t been able to name, which is anti-Palestinian racism.

“This conversation needs to be cracked wide open. It is a press freedom issue because it impacts who gets to tell the stories and the shaping of what gets seen as legitimate,” Mattar adds.