Nearly 25 years after hijacked passenger jets were deliberately flown into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has issued an extraordinary reminder to its journalists: Don’t call what happened on September 11, 2001, a “terrorist attack.”
According to internal guidance reported ahead of the 25th anniversary, CBC journalists were instructed: “Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.” Instead, reporters are encouraged to describe what happened and attribute words such as “terrorism” to governments, officials or other sources.
CBC insists this is not an attempt to rewrite history. Public Affairs Director Kerry Kelly explained that the broadcaster exercises “extreme caution” with the terms “terrorist” and “terrorism,” describing the memo as a reminder of CBC’s longstanding preference for using those words with attribution.
But that explanation exposes a much larger problem.
If deliberately hijacking civilian aircraft and flying them into buildings filled with civilians cannot objectively be described as terrorism, what exactly can?
The controversy also sounds remarkably familiar. We heard virtually the same argument after October 7, 2023.
As Hamas terrorists poured across Israel’s border, murdering civilians, kidnapping hostages and attacking communities and a music festival, CBC journalists received instructions telling them not to independently call the perpetrators “terrorists.”
“The notion of terrorism remains heavily politicized and is part of the story,” CBC’s then-director of journalistic standards George Achi wrote.
Even more remarkably, journalists were instructed that when politicians or governments called the attackers terrorists, CBC should provide context so audiences understood that this was “opinion, not fact.”
That may have sounded like sophisticated journalistic neutrality inside a newsroom. After October 7, it sounded absurd.
After 9/11, it sounds even worse.
The Problem With CBC’s Logic
CBC’s defense rests on the idea that “terrorist” is an emotionally and politically loaded label. Journalists, therefore, should describe actions rather than characterize them.
There is some merit to caution. News organizations should not casually label every insurgent, protester, soldier or political opponent a terrorist simply because one side in a conflict uses that terminology.
But CBC takes a reasonable principle and stretches it until it becomes unreasonable.
Journalism constantly characterizes events.
News organizations describe killings as murders, governments as dictatorships, attacks as invasions, policies as discriminatory and atrocities as war crimes. Journalists routinely use words whose definitions involve factual judgments about what happened.
The solution isn’t to abandon meaningful words. It is to use them accurately.
Terrorism has a recognizable meaning: violence or threats of violence, particularly against civilians, intended to intimidate a population or advance political, ideological or religious objectives.
By any reasonable application of that concept, 9/11 qualifies.
So does the deliberate slaughter and kidnapping of civilians on October 7.
CBC’s approach produces another contradiction. The broadcaster says journalists should simply describe what happened and allow audiences to reach their own conclusions. But journalists necessarily decide which facts to include, what language describes them and what context audiences require.
There is no vocabulary-free journalism.
Calling two aircraft “hijacked passenger jets” is itself characterization based upon facts. Calling the destruction of the World Trade Center an “attack” is characterization. Calling those killed “victims” is characterization.
Why does objectivity suddenly disappear when the word “terrorism” enters the sentence?
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