The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has reversed course on controversial guidance instructing its journalists not to describe the September 11 attacks as “terrorist attacks,” following a fierce backlash over how the publicly funded broadcaster characterized one of the deadliest attacks in modern history.
CBC confirmed that it would make an exception to its existing terminology policy and permit journalists to describe the September 11, 2001, attacks as terrorism.
Basem Boshra, CBC’s senior director of journalistic standards and public trust, said the decision followed the circulation of a “leaked excerpt” from the broadcaster’s internal guidance and the resulting controversy.
“We are doing so to remove what has unfortunately (and unintentionally) become an impediment to clarity and public understanding,” Boshra said, according to ABC News.
The uproar began after Warren Kinsella disclosed the internal guidance in a Toronto Sun column.
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
The instruction was remarkably direct.
“Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks,” the CBC guidance stated, according to Kinsella.
Instead, journalists were directed toward descriptions of the events themselves. One suggested formulation was: “The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes.”
That distinction immediately generated criticism because the September 11 attacks have been routinely described as terrorist attacks by governments, historians and news organizations for nearly 25 years.
The coordinated attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers who seized four commercial aircraft. Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, another struck the Pentagon, and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, including 24 Canadians.
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
Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre condemned CBC’s guidance and argued that avoiding the term fundamentally misrepresented what happened.
“To call 9/11 anything other than a terrorist attack is an appalling distortion of history,” Poilievre said. “It dishonors the victims and their families, the survivors, and the first responders who suffered from the horrors of that day.”
Kinsella was equally unsparing.
“It is not fair and it is in no way accurate,” he wrote. “It is rewriting the historical record. It is manipulating facts to fit an ideological perspective. It is cruel and despicable. It is Orwellian.”
CBC’s broader approach to words such as “terrorist” is based on journalistic caution about terminology that can carry political judgments, particularly in conflicts where competing sides characterize one another as terrorists. Other news organizations also maintain detailed standards governing when journalists should use the term themselves rather than attribute it to governments or other parties.
But critics argued that applying such caution to September 11 created an absurd result.
The @CBC refusal to call September 11 a terrorist attack is political correctness masquerading as journalism. Fear of being accused of Islamophobia cannot become an excuse for denying the plain truth. This is a shameful failure of moral courage.
— George E. Pataki (@GovernorPataki) August 28, 2026
Kinsella rejected the argument that similar practices at other media organizations justified CBC’s policy.
“As we all like to remind our children, however, just because someone else does it doesn’t mean it is right,” he wrote. “And — in particular — a lie is always a lie. A falsehood is a falsehood.”
The fact that CBC receives substantial public funding added another dimension to the dispute.
Kinsella noted that Canadian taxpayers provided the broadcaster with approximately $1.57 billion during 2025-26 and argued that taxpayers were financing an organization unwilling to use straightforward language about an attack in which Canadians themselves were murdered.
“The historical reality is that thousands of innocents were murdered 25 years ago, by terrorists,” Kinsella wrote.
Steven Staley made a similar argument in an opinion piece for The Hub, describing the internal guidance as “Orwellian doublespeak in its purest form.”
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
Staley emphasized the deaths of the 24 Canadian victims and argued that there was nothing unresolved about how the attacks should be classified.
“Every serious newsroom in the English-speaking world settled the question within hours of the second tower falling,” he wrote.
“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.”
