CBC releases policy change after controversy about refusing to refer to 9/11 as ‘terrorist attacks’

Somewhere in an editorial meeting at Canada's public broadcaster, someone thought it necessary to put in writing that staff should not call the September 11 attacks "terrorist attacks." Not a slip of the tongue on live television. A memo. Written down, presumably reviewed, presumably sent out in good conscience by people who thought they were being careful rather than absurd.

The instinct behind that memo isn't really about journalism, it's about a style of institutional caution that treats moral clarity as a liability. Nearly three thousand people were murdered by hijackers who flew planes into buildings on purpose, and somewhere along the line an editor decided that calling it what it is might read as taking a side. That's not neutrality. That's an organization so afraid of complaint that it forgot the plot.

Give the CBC this much: once the memo became public and people were rightly furious, they walked it back and issued a policy change. That's the right outcome, and better late than never. But the reversal only happened because reporters and ordinary readers made noise, not because the editorial process caught its own mistake before it aired.

The bigger lesson isn't really about one broadcaster's memo. It's about what happens when institutions optimize for avoiding offense instead of describing reality. Language gets laundered, atrocities get softened into "attacks," and eventually the audience stops trusting the outlet to call anything by its right name. If you can't say terrorism happened on 9/11, what exactly are you there to report?