CBC reverses course, will call 9/11 attacks terrorism without attribution

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. is making an exception to a longstanding editorial rule that barred its journalists from independently labeling the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as terrorism, reversing itself Friday after a leaked internal memo touched off a political firestorm on both sides of the border.

The reversal came after Basem Boshra, CBC News’ senior director of journalistic standards and public trust, had circulated guidance this week instructing staff not to call the hijackings “terrorist attacks” without attributing the term to a specific source — the network’s standard practice for describing most acts of political violence. The memo, which surfaced ahead of the attacks’ 25th anniversary, was first reported by Toronto Sun columnist Warren Kinsella and instructed reporters to instead describe the day’s events as hijackings that led to jet crashes and the destruction of the World Trade Center.

The guidance drew swift condemnation from American and Canadian officials alike. FBI Director Kash Patel criticized the policy, and Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, blasted the directive on social media hours before CBC dropped it. Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre wrote in a social media post that “CBC must immediately apologize and retract this directive,” while Conservative MP Rachael Thomas of Alberta called it “absolutely shameful.”

By Friday afternoon, Canada’s Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree had waded into the dispute as well, arguing the government’s recognition of 9/11 as an act of terrorism is a matter of law and not merely rhetoric. He said Ottawa’s 2001 anti-terrorism legislation added a definition of “terrorist activity” to Canada’s Criminal Code in direct response to the attacks.

Facing the backlash, Boshra published an editor’s blog post acknowledging the episode had caused “significant concern, anger and hurt” among people who believed CBC News was trying to minimize the horror of that day. He insisted the network had never disputed that the attacks were terrorism and had reported extensively on the motives behind them “as determined by police, governments and an independent commission” — but said CBC had “just made sure to do it with attribution.”

Under the revised guidance, CBC will no longer require that attribution when describing the historic events of Sept. 11 as terrorism, though Boshra said the network’s broader attribution policy for newer acts of political violence remains unchanged.

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SEE ALSO: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation defends memo telling staff not to call 9/11 a ‘terrorist attack’

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The controversy echoes a similar dispute that engulfed CBC in 2023, when a leaked memo reportedly instructed staff not to independently designate Hamas militants as terrorists — rather than describe the term itself as off-limits — following the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. CBC editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon defended that policy at the time in a blog post explaining that the network avoids independently designating groups or acts as terrorism because the terms are “loaded with meaning, politics and emotion.”

CBC spokeswoman Kerry Kelly maintained this week that the network’s journalists had never been told to say the Sept. 11 attacks were not terrorism, and that the memo was simply a routine reminder of the network’s longstanding language guide.