"Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks."
That's the directive the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sent to its own journalists this week, according to an internal memo obtained by the New York Post. Staff at Canada's taxpayer-funded national network were told they could describe September 11, 2001 as a "hijacking" or a "crash" — but the word "terrorist" is apparently too much for the editorial standards department.
Nearly 3,000 people were murdered that day. And the CBC would like you to think of it as a traffic incident.
The memo surfaced on August 27, just weeks before the 25th anniversary of the deadliest attack on American soil. A country that positions itself as America's closest ally just instructed its state media to sanitize the single most defining act of terrorism in modern history.
The CBC receives over a billion dollars a year in Canadian taxpayer funding. That's the backdrop here. This isn't some fringe blog making an editorial choice. This is a government-funded broadcasting corporation telling professional journalists that the word used by every intelligence agency, every law enforcement body, every court proceeding, and every bipartisan congressional investigation to describe September 11 is now off-limits.
"Hijacking" is what happens when someone takes control of a vehicle. "Crash" is what happens when a plane malfunctions. Neither word describes nineteen men who deliberately flew commercial aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania with the explicit goal of killing as many Americans as possible. That's terrorism. It's the textbook definition.
The CBC's language police will argue this is about editorial neutrality — that the word "terrorist" is a value judgment. But that doens't make sense when you learn that the Canadian government unanimously classified 9/11 as terrorism in the weeks following the terror attack in Manhattan. Canada invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty alongside us. They sent troops to Afghanistan. But now their state broadcaster can't bring itself to say the word.
This is the logical endpoint of a editorial philosophy that treats moral clarity as bias. If you can't call September 11 terrorism, you've defined the word out of existence. There is no act of violence that would qualify. The bar doesn't exist anymore.
The timing makes it worse. The 25th anniversary will bring wall-to-wall coverage — ceremonies, retrospectives, interviews with survivors and first responders. And CBC journalists will navigate all of it while carefully avoiding one specific word. Not because it's inaccurate. Because someone in a corner office decided it was uncomfortable.