It’s their way of implying they’re unbiased, but 50/50 comaints doesn’t mean unbiased. In fact it probably means there’s a bias, if it’s about a specific subject only. The facts only is unbiased, but for many people on many subjects, the facts are upsetting.

For example, climate change is real and has been known about for over a century. Reporting on that would be unbiased, but you’d get a lot more complaints from a certain segment of society than another. Managing to get 50/50 means you biased your report to be in the middle. The middle doesn’t mean unbiased.

thanks for linking this. I have to say though, this response is pretty bad imo. The CBC basically just falls back on saying “it’s complicated, uhhhh both sides”.

We’ve received hundreds of public complaints through our ombudsman and standards office about our reporting on this conflict since Oct. 7. About 55 per cent of complainants thought CBC was unfair to Israel, and about 45 per cent thought CBC was unfair to Palestinians.

We have been told that we are not going hard enough at the human catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and beyond. Some fear we are minimizing the destruction of a people and the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinians trapped within borders they can’t leave. They worry we are trying too hard to balance with Israeli perspectives our reporting on a fight in which they see no balance.

even here the author uses minimizing and semi-revisonist language ‘thousands’ instead of the more accurate ‘tens of thousands’.

And we hear from people who feel we are not going hard enough at the disturbing rise in antisemitism (and what they deem is antisemitism disguised as criticism of Israel). They believe our coverage moved on far too quickly from the horrors of Oct. 7, that we give airtime to anti-Israel members of the Jewish community who don’t represent the majority, and that there is not enough journalism on Israel’s effort to defend itself.

this is being presented as the other side of “valid criticism” from that 55/45 split, but there’s obvious problems and clear contradictions here. It’s already concerning enough that they are equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but the very next sentence wants to take away what scant airtime anti-israel Jewish voices get. Am I to conclude that those perspectives are anti-Semitic too? Ridiculous.

The fact that the CBC is presenting these two sides of complaints as equally valid is all the confirmation the breach article needs, honestly.

Well they lost their job and are bitter so it’s going to be biased

They could have lost it for a myriad of other things but we won’t find out about them

However given that the Federal Cons have called for the abolishment of CBC for being pro-Palestine

I would say there is a strong reason for them keeping their heads down and also that both sides being unhappy with their coverage is a decent spot for them

Imma need a source for that last part. I’ve never seen anyone dog ok the CBC, ever. In fact, on Reddit when a CBC article would make it to the front page it would be universally acclaimed for being factual and having an unbiased, effective voice. Most if not all criticism that I’ve seen of the CBC comes from both extremes of the political spectrum.

As a Quebecois it’s always crazy to see how different news coverage can be between the CBC and RC…

The bigger goal is probably not being publicly recognizable. If they posted it under their real name there’d likely be a wave of letters calling for their firing.