Canadian broadcaster reverses policy barring use of 'terrorist attack' label for 9/11

It took a public outcry for Canada's state broadcaster to admit that flying two planes into the World Trade Center was, in fact, terrorism. Not a debate, not a "complicated geopolitical event," not something requiring a style-guide footnote. Just terrorism. That the CBC needed a memo about this in the first place tells you where the internal culture has drifted, and that it took Toronto Sun reporting and political backlash to fix it tells you how little self-correction was happening from the inside.

The instinct to hedge on 9/11 didn't come from nowhere. It's the same instinct that's been creeping through Western newsrooms for years, treating moral clarity as a bias to be managed rather than a judgment to be made. Nearly three thousand people died that morning, most of them civilians going to work. If an editorial board can't call that terrorism without a guidance document, the problem isn't semantics. It's an institution that's forgotten what plain language and plain facts are for.

Credit where it's due: CBC reversed course fast once the memo leaked, and faster once Canadian politicians started asking pointed questions. That's the system working the way it's supposed to. But the reversal shouldn't erase the question of how such guidance got written and approved in the first place, by people presumably paid to know better. A state-funded broadcaster flinching on the plainest atrocity of the 21st century isn't a rounding error. It's a warning light.