CBC Bans Staff From Calling 9/11 Terrorism
CBC Bans Staff From Calling 9/11 Terrorism
The News
Canada's taxpayer-funded public broadcaster has told its journalists not to call the September 11 attacks terrorist attacks.
A leaked internal memo to CBC News staff, first published by the Toronto Sun and independently confirmed by the National Post, reads: "Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks. The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, DC, Pennsylvania and Manhattan."
The memo was signed "BB," identified as Basem Boshra, CBC's senior director of journalistic standards. It went out as the network prepares coverage of the attacks' 25th anniversary on September 11.
Roughly 3,000 people were killed on September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda hijackers flew four commercial planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
Timeline
Al-Qaeda hijackers seize four commercial airliners; about 3,000 people are killed in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.
CBC editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon defends the broadcaster's language policy in a blog post, writing that "terrorist" and "terrorism" are "so loaded with meaning, politics and emotion that they can end up being impediments to our journalism." The same policy draws criticism over CBC's coverage of the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel.
Ahead of the 25th anniversary, Boshra's guidance memo circulates internally to reporters and editors.
The Toronto Sun publishes the memo, the National Post confirms it, and the story spreads across American and Israeli outlets, drawing political backlash in Canada.
Reactions
CBC is not backing down. Public affairs spokeswoman Kerry Kelly said it is "wholly inaccurate" to claim journalists were told the attacks were not terrorism, framing the memo as a routine reminder that such terms are used only with attribution to someone else — a government, an official, a victim.
The broadcaster's standing policy bars its journalists from independently labeling any group or act as terrorist, anywhere in the world.
Conservative MP Rachael Thomas called the memo "absolutely shameful" and accused CBC of dishonoring the victims.
Critics point to the money: CBC took in more than $1.5 billion in Canadian taxpayer funding in 2025-26. Commentators across right-leaning American and Canadian outlets cast the guidance as an attempt to sand down a documented historical fact.
What's Next
CBC has announced no change to the guidance ahead of its September 11 anniversary coverage, so the language is expected to be in force when that coverage airs.
The open questions are whether CBC revises the memo under public pressure, and whether Canadian lawmakers push any formal accountability measure over a policy at a broadcaster they fund.
More
The fight is narrower than it looks. Nobody at CBC is disputing what happened on September 11; the dispute is whether an attribution-only rule is a defensible newsroom standard or a dodge that fails readers on the one attack the definition was practically written for.
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