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Catherine Tait, president and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada, defended the public broadcaster’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict in a sometimes testy meeting with MPs Thursday.
Tait, who was called to appear before the House of Commons heritage committee after her term at the CBC was extended this summer, said CBC’s journalists are independent from government, the company’s executives and the board of directors and are free to report on the conflict as they see fit.
She defended the newsroom’s longstanding practice of not referring to attacks or their perpetrators as “terrorism” or “terrorists,” saying CBC journalists do not want to be seen taking sides in the conflict.
“The word is extremely politically charged and if journalists use the word, they enter into a debate that is not our business. Our business is to remain independent and fact-based,” Tait said.
She said reporters are allowed to use those terms if they’re properly attributed to someone else.
Tait said other major news organizations, including the Globe and Mail, the BBC, Reuters and Agence-France Presse, follow a similar practice.
Tait also said a Conservative claim that the CBC is siding with Hamas puts its reporters on the ground in the region at risk.
She said heated political rhetoric about the broadcaster also threatens the safety of its journalists working in Canada.
“I’m disturbed by the political interference. I worry about our journalists,” she said, adding that independent journalism is a “pillar of our democracy” and should be respected.
Denigrating the press threatens “a fundamental building block of the country’s democracy. That’s why I speak with the level of passion I do today on this subject,” Tait said.
Featured VideoCBC president Catherine Tait appeared before the House committee on heritage to answer questions on recent coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Tait says she stands by the CBC’s journalism and that it’s the ‘finest in the world.’
Bloc Quebecois MP Martin Champoux asked Tait if she feared CBC journalists could face violence at home in this charged environment.
“Yes, absolutely,” she replied.
At the last heritage committee meeting, Conservative MP Rachael Thomas said the CBC’s recent decision to publish an Associated Press article that cited the Palestinian Health Authority blaming Israel for an attack on a Gaza hospital shows the public broadcaster is “on the side of Hamas, which is to be on the side of terrorists, which is to be against the Jewish population.”
Tait said the story was updated 90 minutes after it was published with new information from Israel.
There have been subsequent stories about that blast that attribute the incident to a Palestinian militant group, Tait said.
Thomas claimed Tait conceded that the CBC has spread “dangerous disinformation” about the conflict.
“I have not admitted that,” Tait shot back, adding she was “correcting the record” by spelling out the publishing timeline for that particular story.
Thomas at one point accused Tait of raising her voice. That prompted laughter from Liberal MPs at the committee.
Champoux, who was chairing the committee, said, “I don’t have the impression that she raised her voice.”
Later, in a discussion about trust in news, Thomas accused Tait of not telling the truth. “Telling the truth doesn’t fit into her definition of gaining Canadians’ trust,” Thomas said.
“Jesus,” Tait muttered under breath in apparent frustration.
Other MPs jumped in, asking Thomas to retract her comment.
Featured VideoConservative MP Rachael Thomas questions CBC president Catherine Tait about the corporation’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
NDP MP Peter Julian accused Thomas of turning the committee into a “street brawl” and said her demeanour was “incredibly unparliamentary and inappropriate in every way.”
Thomas pressed on, saying the “coverup coalition” — the Conservatives’ collective term for Liberal and NDP MPs — “is trying to censor my voice and interrupt as much as possible.”
Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman asked Tait to apologize to the Jewish community for initially attributing the hospital blast to Israel by publishing that AP story.
Lantsman said Hamas “admits it uses terrorism to further its goals” and CBC’s decision not to use that term is “obstruction, it is biased and it does help Hamas.”
She said MPs have a right to question an institution that gets more than $1 billion in parliamentary appropriations every year.
“We stand behind our journalism. I will not apologize because the journalism is among the finest in the world. If you have a concern, I invite you to address it to the independent ombudsman,” Tait said.
Julian said Thomas’s claims about CBC being “on the side of Hamas” are “irresponsible” and “incendiary.”
“She has not apologized in any way for her appalling comments,” Julian said of Thomas, while noting 33 journalists have been killed in the Israel-Gaza conflict so far.
Beyond the Israel-Hamas conflict, Tait also spoke briefly about her priorities.
She said she wants to boost Indigenous representation and bolster local news coverage.
Tait said CBC’s funding, when inflation is taken into account, has been flat for 20 years.
She said a sizeable funding cut — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said he will “defund the CBC” if elected — would be damaging.
She said the corporation wouldn’t be able to fund its operations serving Canadians in dozens of communities in English, French and eight Indigenous languages.
She said the public broadcaster is “a powerful connecting force that stitches together this enormous country over six time zones, coast to coast to coast.”
While reliant on government funding for part of its budget — the CBC also collects about $400 million in advertising and other revenue every year — Tait said the company is not beholden to the government of the day.
When asked if she knew the Conservative Party received COVID-19 subsidies during the pandemic, Tait said she did.
“Does that make them beholden to the government?” Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed asked. No, Tait replied.
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