Canada’s CBC News will no longer require its journalists to attribute characterization of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as terrorism to outside sources, revising internal guidance after a leaked excerpt sparked public backlash.
“After reviewing our current language guidance, we have decided to adjust it to clarify that direct attribution is not required for describing the historic events of 9/11 as terrorism,” Basem Boshra, the broadcaster’s senior director of journalistic standards and public trust, wrote in a Friday blog post.
“We are doing so to remove what has unfortunately (and unintentionally) become an impediment to clarity and public understanding,” Boshra continued.
CBC said its broader policy of attributing claims about the causes and motivations of politically or ideologically motivated violence to officials and experts remains in place.
The leaked guidance, first reported by Canadian media days before the 25th anniversary of the attacks, instructed CBC News staff not to refer to Sept. 11 as “terrorist attacks.” It instead described the events as hijackings involving passenger jets that crashed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania and destroyed the World Trade Center.
Boshra said the excerpt had been published without sufficient context and led some members of the public to believe the broadcaster was minimizing the attacks or obscuring Al-Qaeda’s responsibility.
The CBC said it had never disputed that the attacks were terrorism and that its coverage over the past quarter-century had documented the attacks, the pursuit and prosecution of those responsible, and the loss and grief they caused.
