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Hub Exclusive: U.S. Ambassador says Canadians are consuming an ‘unhealthy’ amount of American news

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David Cohen, the US Ambassador to Canada, is interviewed in Ottawa, Feb. 22, 2022. David Kawai/The Canadian Press

U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Cohen says Canadians are consuming too much American news, which he believes is “unhealthy” because of American legacy media’s polarizing and partisan nature.

He added that it’s come at the expense of Canadians consuming news about their own country’s politics.

Cohen made the comments during a recent interview with The Hub’s managing editor, Harrison Lowman.

When asked about Canadians’ apparent obsession and preoccupation with the political news of the United States, Cohen, who is a former Comcast media executive, explained that he finds Canada’s consumption of American news from CNN, MSNBC, and Fox to be somewhat strange.

“I do think it is odd, particularly when I contrast it to the United States, where…virtually no one in the United States is paying any attention to Canadian politics,” he said.

“Every major Canadian household has easy access to American cable television news,” he noted.

“I’ll be honest with you, before I came here…Canadian cable television news outlets, I didn’t even know how to get them in the United States,” he added.

According to new statistics from the Reuters Institute, a significant number of Canadians, particularly in English Canada, rely on American outlets like CNN and the New York Times on a weekly basis for news.

In 2018, Canada was the biggest foreign market for the New York Times, making up around 27 percent of its total foreign audience. In an interview with Canadaland, the then New York Times Canada bureau chief said the paper’s Canadian audience hovered around 94,000.

In 2024, a New York Times press release announced the paper had reached two million international subscriptions, highlighting that it has “seen subscriber growth in recent years” in Canada. Some estimates have claimed the New York Times has more paying Canadian digital subscribers than any Canadian news outlet.

A Canadian fixation with America

Within our borders, Canadian media outlets have also become fixated on American politics.

True North reported that Canada’s public broadcaster CBC published 68 stories about the Kamala Harris campaign in one month. Back in 2020, CBC published 500 percent more stories about Harris than about Leslyn Lewis, a black woman running for federal office in Canada.

CBC has also held U.S. election night TV specials for the 2020 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

“World coverage has been a hallmark of CBC News since the public broadcaster was founded, and we dedicate more resources to international reporting than any other media outlet in Canada,” CBC general manager and editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon recently explained in an article justifying the public broadcaster’s coverage of U.S. politics.

“​​Within our coverage of the world, the United States occupies a special place for some obvious reasons,” he added. “From arts and culture, national security, the economy to the environment—our countries are inextricably linked.”

As previously reported by The Hub, Canada’s politics are growing more and more Americanized.

Slanted news

Ambassador Cohen said even American outlets themselves have what he considers to be “an unhealthy preoccupation with American politics.”

“You’re getting an unfiltered and 24/7 perspective on the political structure from all of these cable television news outlets, without the balancing perspective of lots of people around you who have different opinions and who can balance a little bit what you’re seeing on a cable television news show,” he explained.

“I do think it’s unhealthy,” said Cohen, admitting that for his own mental health he took an intentional break from his country’s political news channels this summer.

According to media analysts, America’s “Big Three” news channels—Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC—all have political biases.

The AllSides bias checker rates Fox News as having a right-wing bias, CNN as having a bias that leans Left, and MSNBC as having a left-wing bias.

Meanwhile, many American newsrooms are lacking ideological diversity. According to a 2022 Syracuse University study, just 3.4 percent of American journalists now describe themselves as Republicans, while 36.4 percent describe themselves as Democrats.

“I come from Pennsylvania… [which] I think has been properly identified as maybe the battleground state in the upcoming election,” said Cohen. “So I can’t go anywhere in Pennsylvania where I don’t find equal numbers of people who have very different political opinions than what is being carried on MSNBC and, to a large extent, on CNN.”

“It’s just not necessarily an accurate depiction of the political process and the way people think to just get your news and information from cable television news outlets,” he added.

This is not the first time that Cohen has spoken about Canada’s massive appetite for American news.

In a July interview with the Hill Times, Cohen said he believes one of the reasons why Canadians are often anxious about the United States is because of their media consumption.

The Hub’s full-length interview with U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Cohen can be found here.

Élie Cantin-Nantel is The Hub’s Ottawa Correspondent. Prior to joining the team, he practiced journalism for a variety of outlets. Élie also has experience working on Parliament Hill and is completing a joint honours in communication and political science at the University of Ottawa. He is bilingual....

Canadians in Lebanon are at least four times the number of Canada’s last three foreign evacuations combined

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Smoke rises in Lebanon next to the Israeli-Lebanese border at the Galilee region, Aug. 4, 2024. Leo Correa/AP Photo.

A Hub Exclusive

The number of Canadians registered in Lebanon is nearly 23,000, or four times the amount evacuated by Global Affairs Canada’s past three evacuation efforts in Afghanistan, Sudan, and Haiti combined.

Following an attack by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah on Israel’s north late last month, Global Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly implored Canadians to leave Lebanon while they still have the opportunity to do so.

On August 22, Israel struck more than 10 locations across southern Lebanon determined by the Israel Defence Force to be Hezbollah weapon depots, military buildings, and projectile launchers. This was in response to Hezbollah’s volley of 50 rockets and various drones striking homes in the Golan Heights hours prior.

This past weekend, an Israeli airstrike on Nabatieh, Lebanon, killed 10. Another strike on an arms depot in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley region injured eight. In response, Hezbollah then fired a volley of rockets targeting an Israeli kibbutz and military post, injuring two Israeli soldiers.

Lebanon is the front line of increasing Middle Eastern conflict and possibly an all-out war, with Canadian citizens caught in the crossfire.

“The security situation in Lebanon is becoming increasingly volatile and unpredictable due to sustained and escalating violence between Hezbollah and Israel and could deteriorate further without warning,” Joly said in a news release from June. In it, the minister implied Canadians could struggle to leave the country if Lebanon closed its airports.

If this happened, evacuations by the government of Canada “are not guaranteed,” she said. It has nevertheless been reported that Canada is preparing for evacuations out of Lebanon, the country’s largest since the last Lebanese evacuation in 2006, using a CC-150 Polaris aircraft in the region.

The number of Canadians currently in Lebanon is 22,981, according to the Registration of Canadians Abroad (ROCA) and information provided by Global Affairs Canada to The Hub. But this may only be a fraction of the true number of Canadians in the region.

Global Affairs’ ROCA is a registry service used to catalogue Canadians travelling in other countries and provide Canadian consulate instructions in the event of an emergency. Because it’s voluntary, it doesn’t reflect the total number of Canadian citizens or permanent residents in a given country.

The number of Canadians registered in Lebanon is 4.3 times greater than the 5,243 total people evacuated by Global Affairs Canada during their past three evacuation efforts in Afghanistan (2021), Sudan (2023), and Haiti (2024). Those 5,000-plus total evacuees included Canadian family members of different nationalities and other eligible nationals, according to Global Affairs.

For instance, in 2021 Canada evacuated around 3,700 people from Afghanistan during the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban’s return to power. Many were Afghans with a “significant and/or enduring relationship with the Government of Canada,” as part of a 13-nation air-bridge. While only 268 Canadians in Afghanistan chose to register with ROCA, 711 Canadian citizens or permanent residents were evacuated during “Operation AEGIS,” according to Global Affairs.

 

The number of registered Canadians in Lebanon is also five times greater than the 4,590 ROCA registrants in Afghanistan, Sudan, and Haiti combined. In the two most recent conflicts, significantly fewer Canadians were evacuated than were registered with ROCA.

On April 15, 2023, Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, erupted into intense violence—the result of the country’s failed planned transition from autocratic to democratic rule, closing the country’s only international airport.

Thirteen days later, Canada sent evacuation planes to a Sudanese airbase 30 kilometres north of Khartoum. By that time however, many Canadians in Khartoum had been trapped for days amid horrific violence or found evacuation through other countries like Germany. Global Affairs Canada evacuated only 462 Canadian citizens and permanent residents from Sudan, just over a third of the 1,503 registered in the county.

This year, Canada evacuated 697 people from Haiti. In 2021, its prime minister, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated. The country on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola soon fell to gang rule, resulting in the deaths of thousands. It also meant commercial flights were suspended.

As of March, Canada facilitated travel out of Haiti to the bordering Dominican Republic. Those flights ended in early April, when Minister Joly determined no more were needed. Global Affairs Canada had evacuated 546 Canadian citizens or permanent residents—just a fifth of the 2,819 Canadians registered in Haiti.

In Taiwan, meanwhile, 5,590 Canadians are registered with Global Affairs’ ROCA. There are fears that mounting tensions between China and its Western allies (including the U.S.) over the Asian island’s sovereignty could one day spill into war, putting those Canadians at risk.

During the Israel-Lebanon war in 2006, Canada spent $94 million and used several naval ships to evacuate 15,000 people.

Kiernan is The Hub's Data Visualization Journalist. He was previously a journalism fellow for The Canadian Press and CBC News, where he produced for Rosemary Barton Live, contributed to CBC’s NewsLabs and did business reporting. He graduated from the School of Journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University with minors in global…...

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