After being pummeled for warning its reporters not to use the T-word in relation to 9/11, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has agreed that perhaps it can bend in this instance and call terrorism by its real name.
Basem Boshra, senior director of journalistic standards and public trust at CBC, frumped that the poor, picked-on, misunderstood broadcaster would violate its rules because a “leaked excerpt” of a memo demanding reporters not call 9/11 terrorism was making life just way too uncomfortable, as it was called a variety of unpleasant names, according to ABC News.
“We are doing so to remove what has unfortunately (and unintentionally) become an impediment to clarity and public understanding,” he said.
There was perfect clarity in the storm of outrage the memo generated.
Any agency in Canada that doesn’t publicly reject this bastardization of history, and an insult to the souls lost during our largest terrorist attack in US history will no longer have friend in this FBI… Not to mention our heroes that responded in the aftermath 🇺🇸
WE WILL NEVER…
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) August 28, 2026
“To call 9/11 anything other than a terrorist attack is an appalling distortion of history,” Pierre Poilievre, leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, said, according to The Hill. “It dishonors the victims and their families, the survivors, and the first responders who suffered from the horrors of that day.”
CBC began to take heat after, writing in the Toronto Sun, Warren Kinsella blew the whistle on a CBC edict that said, “Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.”
Preferred language, Kinsella wrote, would say, “The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes.”
Yesterday we reminded Canadians that @CBCNews refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organization. Today, reports of a leaked memo reveals they are now instructing staff not to call 9/11 a “terrorist attack.”
Sanitizing the most infamous acts of terror in modern history as mere… pic.twitter.com/xihbUdKtqF
— CIJA (@CIJAinfo) August 26, 2026
“It is not fair and it is in no way accurate. It is rewriting the historical record. It is manipulating facts to fit an ideological perspective. It is cruel and despicable. It is Orwellian,” he wrote.
Confronted by CBC’s justification that many news organizations have found less confrontational words to describe terrorism, Kinsella was highly skeptical.
“As we all like to remind our children, however, just because someone else does it doesn’t mean it is right. And — in particular — a lie is always a lie. A falsehood is a falsehood. We tell our kids that, too,” he wrote.
Truth matters in a free society. Sanitizing September 11 dishonors the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered, the first responders who ran toward danger and every family that still carries the pain of that day. No institution should be afraid to tell the truth.
— George E. Pataki (@GovernorPataki) August 28, 2026
“The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which all of us gave $1.57 billion in 2025-26, operates under different rules. It tells us lies about history and reality. And the historical reality is that thousands of innocents were murdered 25 years ago, by terrorists,” he wrote.
“We all know that, we all call it that. At CBC, they don’t care. They do and say whatever the hell they want to,” he wrote.
In an opinion piece in the Hub, Steven Staley called the memo “Orwellian doublespeak in its purest form, issued by a man whose salary every Canadian taxpayer is compelled to pay and whom none of them can fire.”
Canada’s state-funded CBC embarrassed the country so badly that its Public Safety Minister and intelligence agency issued statements calling 9/11 “terrorist attacks.” PM Carney should order a review of whether CBC applies its policy impartially—or to sanitize Islamist terror. https://t.co/KOWtN2knQa pic.twitter.com/IcVTrkec1n
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) August 29, 2026
Noting that 24 Canadians were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, he wrote, “Every serious newsroom in the English-speaking world settled the question within hours of the second tower falling.”
“Only the broadcaster that Canadians fund with more than a billion dollars a year has decided, a quarter century later, that the matter deserves a different framing,” he wrote.
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