After nearly two years of Israel’s war on Gaza, Canada’s major newsrooms are finally telling their audiences that Palestinians are starving. Stories now mention the spectre of a man-made famine; some even use the word “genocide.” At first glance, it appears to be a long-overdue course correction. For many young Canadians, however, the damage is done. A generation raised with the world’s images at its fingertips has concluded that legacy media cannot be trusted.
As part of my master’s research last year, I interviewed nine Generation Z Canadians about their relationship with news. They didn’t start from a place of blind trust, but Oct. 7 and its aftermath marked a turning point. Hamas’ attacks in Israel that day, and Israel’s devastating military response in Gaza, dominated world headlines — yet both unfolded against a 78 year-long backdrop of occupation and resistance that news coverage rarely made room to explain.
Around the world, people watched livestreams of civilians killed, Instagram reels of hospitals levelled, and TikToks of neighbourhoods razed. They then saw news headlines reprint government talking points and news anchors sanitize events in antiseptic language about death tolls and “collateral damage.”
Talia, a 22-year-old in Vancouver, called it a “radical shift” in her relationship with news. She pointed to how Western outlets described some deaths as “retaliatory” or due to “natural causes,” while others were labelled “massacres”. “It’s like they’re trying to tell me what I should care about,” she said. iMEdD and the National have published studies on the killed-vs-died reporting style, which underline how Palestinian deaths are often reported using a passive voice, obscuring the perpetrator.
This disconnect cemented something deeper: the belief that legacy media are not just biased, but complicit in Palestinian suffering. The erosion of trust is reflected in broader trends: the 2025 Digital News Report found that only 37 per cent of English news consumers in Canada say they trust the news, down from 47 per cent four years earlier.
Inside the newsroom gag order
For the past 22 months (and long before Oct. 7), newsrooms have fed this alienation. Coverage has conflated Palestine with Islam, muddled criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and regurgitated IDF talking points. Palestinian voices have been absent from news coverage or relegated to “both-sides” panels that require them to denounce Hamas. Reporting routinely leans on official Israeli statements while casting doubt on Palestinian sources (i.e. a pattern of referring to Gaza’s “Hamas-run” Health Ministry, whose figures have been deemed reliable by sources including the Lancet health journal). A billionaire-funded lobby group, HonestReporting Canada, has mounted organized campaigns to police and control coverage; strong-arming newsrooms across the country into redactions and retractions. Journalists who challenge these framings have faced consequences. It’s a common story in Canadian newsrooms.
Colleagues across the country have faced similar silencing and erasure in their attempts to petition their newsrooms for representative coverage. In May 2021, after one of the deadliest attacks on Gaza, hundreds of journalists signed an open letter to Canadian newsrooms calling for fairer and more balanced coverage. Within days, The Intercept reported “at least three people were completely taken off coverage of the region,” and two CBC journalists told Vice News they’d been barred from covering the region. Since Oct. 7, the stories from inside the newsroom kept mounting. In my essay, Why I Left CTV News: The Fight for Press Freedom in Canada, I recount how my own piece on the Wet’suwet’en protests was quietly removed from the network’s website following an HRC harassment campaign. Molly Schumann penned a scathing expose on how CBC has whitewashed Israel’s crimes; the Breach revealed a CTV policy forbidding its journalists from using the word Palestine on air; journalism professor Shenaz Kermalli has chronicled systemic suppression of Palestinian-focused reporting. There have been so many accounts of internal resistance, the Breach compiled them into an anthology titled, When Genocide Wasn’t News, (including my essay on my experience with CTV). Together, these stories suggest the gulf between journalists and their own institutions is as much a part of the trust crisis as the content viewers see on screen.
One CBC journalist told me none of the recent famine-focused coverage comes from a place of concern for human life. “I see journalists and organizations as either trying to save face because they know they didn’t cover this story properly for the past 78 years, or they see the starvation angle as a ‘safe’ way to cover Palestine without explicitly blaming Israel for it.” By foregrounding starvation — which can be framed as a tragic by-product of war (unlike bombing campaigns or forced displacement) — media organizations are able to acknowledge suffering while avoiding explicit criticism of the Israeli government.
A mic for Netanyahu
The limits of this approach were on display Aug. 10 as the flurry of famine-focused coverage came to a halt. Instead, networks turned their attention to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s press conference live, uninterrupted, as he blamed Gazans’ deaths on Hamas (not his own military) and pledged to “finish the job” and take over Gaza. Canadian headlines simply reiterated his pledge to expand Israel’s offensive. They largely excluded any Palestinian perspective. Hours later, Israel targeted a tent of the last remaining Al Jazeera reporters in Gaza, killing six journalists, including Anas al-Sharif, the most prominent correspondent in the region. Israeli officials accused him of heading a Hamas cell but has provided no proof, no evidence. A UN special rapporteur and press freedom group say the claims are unsubstantiated, but that didn’t stop the National Post from running with Israel’s story. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the toll of murdered journalists since Oct. 7 is now 186. In another stark example of media complicity, a new report by the Maple reveals that CBC acquiesced to an Israeli censorship order to not record or broadcast images of a recent aid drop over Gaza. This is the backdrop against which any talk of a “shift” in coverage must be judged.
The humanitarian framing also dovetails with political messaging. On July 21, Canada joined France and the UK in a joint statement that condemned Israel’s “dangerous” aid distribution system and said the war in Gaza “must end now,” yet avoided using the word genocide or calling for sanctions. Days later, Prime Minister Mark Carney accused Israel of violating international law by denying humanitarian aid. Ottawa has hinted it will recognise a Palestinian state but only after elections are held, even though Gaza is largely destroyed and where 147 of the UN’s 193 member states already recognise Palestine as sovereign. Framing the crisis as a matter of “aid delivery” allows governments to scold Israel while keeping diplomatic levers, and use recognition of a Palestinian state as bargaining chips.
This isn’t simply an argument about adjectives. Language shapes reality. When the media describes a siege as a “blockade” or a massacre as a “toll,” it erases agency and dulls outrage. As long as journalists hesitate to name starvation and mass killing as genocide, they shield those in power from accountability. That is not neutrality; it is complicity.
When mainstream coverage fails, audiences turn elsewhere. My research participants described scrolling TikTok, Instagram, and citizen-journalism feeds – unfiltered, raw, decentralized, and often unvetted. This comes with pitfalls: propaganda, misinformation, and news burn out. But it’s the devil they choose. “At least on social media, I feel like I have a choice in what I see,” said 24-year-old Maria. Most participants relied on accounts with unabashed viewpoints. “At least they’re honest about where they’re coming from,” said 24-year-old Omar. When young Canadians find more honesty in influencers’ admitted biases than in a newsroom’s claims of objectivity, it becomes clear that the erosion of trust in journalism isn’t about isolated errors. It’s about newsrooms clinging to a hollow notion of neutrality.
Audiences see the patterns: who is interviewed and who isn’t, which words are chosen, whose humanity is recognized. If journalists want to rebuild trust, the solution isn’t to retreat into false “balance” or further police their language. It is to show that journalism can be a force for justice. That means centring underrepresented voices, reporting facts even when they implicate our allies, and resisting co-ordinated campaigns to rewrite the narrative. It also means readers and viewers must hold media institutions to account: support outlets that practise rigorous and transparent reporting; call out euphemisms that whitewash atrocities; demand accountability from our public broadcaster; and use your platforms to amplify those on the ground.
Journalism matters because words have power. Let’s use them honestly. Let’s call starvation a war crime, displacement ethnic cleansing, and mass killing genocide when the evidence supports it. Name complicity when governments hedge their statements and delay recognition while civilians starve. A free press must be willing to confront power, not simply echo it. Only then can legacy media begin to rebuild trust with a generation that has seen too much to accept euphemism over truth.
Iman Kassam is Canadian broadcast journalist of 15 years in radio, television, podcasting, and digital media. They have reported extensively on Indigenous issues, working with Native Communications and APTN National News before moving to CBC Radio and CTV News. Today, Iman is a professor of journalism at Seneca College and researches trust and credibility in the news online.