The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) recently told its reporters and editors not to use the phrase "terrorist attacks" when covering the upcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11.
"Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks," a recent staff memo reportedly reads about halfway through, with the last two words linking back to the CBC's internal language guide.
"The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania and Manhattan. The World Trade Center was destroyed," it said.
The director of the FBI, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Republican members of Congress and Canada's Conservative party all criticized the CBC following media reports about a memo.
Basem Boshra, senior director of journalistic standards and public trust and author of the leaked memo, said in a blog post late Friday afternoon that CBC had reversed course and would make an exception to the rule for the 9/11 attacks.
Tim Graham of Media Research Center says the CBC is trying to hide its bias by pretending that using the word "terrorism" makes them sound like they are not impartial.
"The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is trying to be like the BBC in Britain," he tells AFN.
In a statement to the New York Post, the CBC explained that it does not itself designate specific groups as terrorists and avoids the word when possible because it is so loaded with meaning, politics and emotion.
"Do you think that they killed 3,000 people without a political motive?" Graham asks of al-Qaeda, the group led and founded by Osama bin Laden, who orchestrated the operation. "That's basically what terrorism is defined as."
The Associated Press guidance avoids the word as well, except when it can be attributed to a source or for historical events that are widely acknowledged as terrorist actions. 9/11 qualifies in the AP Stylebook.
Graham says it is silly to call terrorists "militants."
"You have these publicly funded broadcasters who don't seem to support the governments they're funded by," he observes. "They seem anti-Western."
By "watering everything down," Graham says they are compromising their journalistic integrity.
