MONTREAL — Radio-Canada has acknowledged that a documentary it aired last month was “clearly pro-Palestinian” and says it will broadcast programs offering other viewpoints on Israel and Gaza in the future.

Geneviève Guay, director of complaints about information at the CBC’s French-language network, was responding to a complaint by the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting Canada about Radio-Canada’s airing of Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land: U.S. Media and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

The documentary, produced by the left-leaning, U.S.-based Media Education Foundation in 2004, was shown Oct. 23 on RDI, Radio-Canada’s specialty news channel, as part of the series Les grands reportages.

Guay acknowledged that the four-year-old film has only been partially updated since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

“Consequently, our introduction should have placed it in the context of 2004, rather than present it as reflecting the current challenges of the Middle East in the run-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election,” Guay said.

“It did indeed present a highly personal point of view on the conflict – one that we acknowledge was clearly pro-Palestinian. Rest assured that we have recently acquired other documentaries providing different perspectives on the situation in Israel and Gaza, which we plan to air in the coming months.”

HonestReporting Canada executive director Mike Fegelman welcomed Guay’s promise of additional documentaries and the acknowledgement that the film was introduced without proper context, but “we still felt that this wasn’t sufficient, and we called on our 23,000 members to ask [Radio-Canada] ombudsman Julie Miville-Dechene to conduct a formal review of the matter to determine if the network’s presentation of the film adhered to Radio-Canada standards of broadcasting and codes of ethics.”

Fegelman wrote to HonestReporting’s subscribers: “Airing a ‘pro-Israel’ documentary at a later date doesn’t absolve the network for its original sin in airing a ‘pro-Palestinian’ propaganda film… By broadcasting this film, Radio-Canada abdicated its responsibility as a public broadcaster to do the necessary quality control checks, which should have ensured that this pro-Palestinian advocacy film was not aired in the first place.”

The organization complained that Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land was “rife with false premises, serious omissions, and unfounded malicious allegations,” and that Radio-Canada had “breached its own journalistic standards and practices by airing a one-sided partisan polemic bent on vilifying a fellow democracy, the State of Israel.”

It also objected to Radio-Canada host Simon Durivage’s introduction, saying it “parroted the film’s anti-Israel thesis.”

The film compares the difference between the American media’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and specifically Israel’s settlement of Jews in the West Bank and Gaza, with that of other media in the world. It argues that the U.S. media are providing a distorted view of the situation in Israel’s favour because of a conspiracy between Israel and powerful groups in the United States.

According to a description on the Media Education Foundation’s website, the film “exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites – oil and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others – work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.”

The film specifically mentions HonestReporting’s U.S. headquarters and another pro-Israel media watchdog, CAMERA, as having contributed to false perceptions of the conflict.

Fegelman said his group is not the only one that has concerns about Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land. An analysis of the film by Yitzhak Santis, director of Middle East affairs for the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco, concluded that public television stations should inform their audiences that the film is “not an objective study of media coverage of this conflict, but an advocacy piece with a political agenda.”

In introducing the film, Durivage said in part: “According to Middle East experts, for 40 years, the settlement policy of the Hebrew state has grown inside the occupied Palestinian territories. The result: daily violence on both the Palestinian and Israeli side.”

Fegelman points out that CBC’s guidelines for “point-of-view documentaries in the sense of advocacy” state that the network should exercise caution in considering such films for broadcast, guarding against exploitation by political or economic interest groups, and, if they are aired, assure “fairness and balance by other means”

In her letter, Guay wrote that in airing point-of-view documentaries, Radio-Canada is not endorsing the opinions they contain. They are chosen “because we feel they contain noteworthy information.

“Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land contained relevant information for Canadians about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is covered in the U.S. media.”