Would you hesitate, even for a second, before calling September 11 a terrorist attack? Most people I know would not. Nearly three thousand lives ended in a few hours. Families still mark empty chairs. First responders still live with dust in their lungs and images they cannot unsee. And yet, as the twenty-fifth anniversary approaches, a leaked internal memo from Canada’s national public broadcaster told staff to avoid words like terrorist and terrorism when they describe that morning. Use hijackings instead. Describe crashes. Name the cities. Do not, the note said, call the day what almost every official record already calls it.
A Memo, A Rebuke, And A Very Public Argument About Words
The instruction did not arrive in a vacuum. Anniversary coverage needs planning. Editors want consistency. That part is ordinary. What is not ordinary is the decision to treat the most lethal assault on American soil in modern memory as a set of aviation incidents first and an act of terror only if someone else says so on camera. I’ve found that language fights like this rarely stay inside a newsroom. They spill into diplomacy, into intelligence work, and into the way a country remembers its dead.
The FBI director did not wait for a carefully worded press release. He went public. Any Canadian agency that failed to reject what he called a bastardization of history, and an insult to the souls lost in the largest terrorist attack in United States history, would no longer have a friend in the Bureau. He also pointed to the people who ran toward the smoke. That is not a small thing to put on the record. The Bureau is not a columnist. When its leader talks like that, partners notice.
Failure to recognize and confront radical and terrorist ideologies significantly endangers efforts to establish and harmonize a shared national and economic security partnership.
– U.S. ambassador to Canada, commenting on the dispute
The American ambassador amplified the message. He reminded readers that U.S. investigators have helped stop plots and criminal operations north of the border. Cooperation is not a slogan. It is file sharing, joint task forces, and quiet phone calls at odd hours. If one side starts to sound as if it cannot say the word terrorism out loud, the other side starts to wonder what else will be softened when the next alert lands.
What The Internal Note Actually Said
According to the text that circulated among staff, reporters were told not to refer to the September 11 attacks as terrorist attacks. The hijackings, the note explained, led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, Pennsylvania, and Manhattan. The World Trade Center was destroyed. Second reference: WTC. Clean. Spare. Almost bureaucratic.
There is a craft argument hiding in that wording. Newsrooms have spent years arguing that terrorist is a loaded label. Governments apply it unevenly. One faction’s militant is another faction’s freedom fighter. Editors fear that if they adopt the word themselves, they stop describing and start judging. I get the instinct. I also think the instinct collapses when the facts are this settled.
Al-Qaeda planned the operation. The group had already been listed as a terrorist organization by the United States years before the planes took off. Canada later listed the same network. The plotters trained, financed, and coordinated the murders as a political and religious campaign against civilians and symbols of American power. If that is not terrorism by any working definition used in law and intelligence, then the word has no meaning left.
Public affairs staff at the broadcaster later said the memo only restated a long-standing practice. Extreme caution before using terrorist or terrorism. Prefer attribution. Quote officials. Quote victims. Quote experts. Bear witness, they said, without the newsroom itself designating a group or an act. Many large organizations share a version of that caution. That is true. It is also true that caution can slide into evasion when the anniversary is twenty-five years old and the designation is not in dispute.
Why Neutrality Sounds Different On This File
Journalistic neutrality is not the same thing as verbal emptiness. You can be fair and still name a mass-casualty plot by a listed organization. You can attribute motives, describe ideology, and still say the method was terrorism. In my experience, audiences hear the difference immediately. They know when a newsroom is being careful and when it is being coy.
The same institution has faced this argument before. After the October 2023 assault on Israeli civilians, internal guidance again warned against calling militants, soldiers, or anyone else terrorists in the newsroom’s own voice. An ombudsman later concluded that the attribution-only practice did not breach internal standards. That finding matters for process. It does not settle the public question. Standards can be internally consistent and still look morally thin from the outside.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is the claim that the words themselves become impediments. Loaded with politics. Loaded with emotion. Yes. Murder of civilians for political ends is emotional. Families are political actors whether they want to be or not, because governments write the history that follows. Removing the word does not remove the politics. It just relocates the politics into the choice to stay silent.
The Human Ledger Behind The Vocabulary Fight
Numbers still shock if you let them sit on the page. Almost three thousand people killed. Thousands more injured. Office workers. Passengers. Crew. Pentagon staff. People who happened to be on a sidewalk. Twenty-four Canadians among the dead. That last figure should matter in Ottawa. This was not only an American tragedy that Canadians watched on television. It was also a Canadian funeral list.
Opposition lawmakers called the directive shameful. One argued that refusing to call the day an act of terrorism dishonors victims, families, survivors, and first responders. Another said taxpayers fund the broadcaster and then get gaslit. Strong language. Predictable language, even. Still, the political heat is not the whole story. The deeper issue is whether a public institution that claims to guard national memory can describe the event in plainer terms than a middle-school history book.
- The operation was planned by a listed terrorist network.
- Civilians were the primary targets, not an accidental byproduct.
- Four coordinated hijackings were the method, not the meaning.
- Rescue workers paid a second price in illness and trauma.
- Allied governments still use the attacks as a baseline for threat assessments.
When I talk with people who covered that week, they do not remember a debate about nomenclature. They remember phone banks, missing-person flyers, and the smell of the site. The word terrorism was not a flourish. It was shorthand for a fact pattern everyone could see. Two and a half decades later, the fact pattern has not changed. Only the anxiety about adjectives has grown.
Public Money, Public Trust, And Editorial Distance
Canada’s public broadcaster is not a boutique magazine. It receives well over a billion dollars in federal support in a typical budget cycle. Recent figures put next year’s allocation near $1.38 billion, down from a higher mark the year before. That is still a fortune by any newsroom standard. The prime minister has called the institution one of the most important in the country, a pillar of culture and a shield against foreign disinformation.
Those claims raise the bar. If the job is to be a reliable forum, then the forum has to be able to say hard words when the evidence is not close. Disinformation thrives in fog. If a state-funded newsroom treats a settled designation as too hot to handle in its own voice, critics will argue that the fog is self-inflicted.
I am not arguing that every gunman and every militia should get the same label on first mention. Context differs. Evidence differs. Legal listings differ. That is exactly why 9/11 is a poor test case for maximal caution. The organizers are listed. The intent is documented. The civilian toll is counted. The anniversary is not a breaking story with incomplete facts. It is a commemorative file with a mountain of records.
| Question | What the record shows | Why wording matters |
| Who planned the attacks? | Al-Qaeda leadership and trained cells | A listed organization, not a mystery actor |
| What was the method? | Four coordinated hijackings of passenger jets | Method describes how, not why |
| Who died? | Almost 3,000 people, including 24 Canadians | Civilian mass casualty is central to the definition |
| How do governments classify the group? | Terror listing in the U.S. since 1999, in Canada since 2002 | Official status already exists |
| What do partners need? | Shared language on threat and ideology | Soft wording can look like soft resolve |
Security Partnerships Do Not Run On Euphemism
Cross-border policing is a grind. Watchlists. Flight data. Financial traces. Tips that look silly until one of them is not. The Bureau’s warning was blunt because bluntness is sometimes the point. If Canadian institutions appear unwilling to name radical and terrorist ideologies, American counterparts may treat that as a risk indicator rather than a style choice.
That does not mean every disagreement should become a rupture. Allies argue. They still share intelligence the next morning. But trust has a tone. Tone is built from repeated signals. A memo that treats hijacking as the preferred frame and terrorism as a word to be borrowed from someone else’s mouth is a signal, whether editors intend it or not.
Think about a future plot that spans both countries. Investigators will need to brief ministers, courts, and the public. If the public vocabulary has been sanded down for years, the briefing room inherits that sanded language. Jurors hear it. Voters hear it. So do the people who still want to copy the 2001 playbook. Clarity is not cruelty. Clarity is how a democracy explains why some groups are banned and some plots are stopped with force.
The Old Newsroom Rule And Where It Breaks
There is a respectable version of the attribution rule. Do not throw around terrorist as a slur. Do not apply it to street protests. Do not let a government press officer do your thinking. Require evidence of intent to intimidate a population or coerce a government through violence against civilians. That is grown-up editing.
The rule breaks when it becomes a reflex that no longer looks at the file in front of it. September 11 is not an ambiguous insurgency in a contested province. It is a dated, investigated, prosecuted, memorialized campaign of mass murder. Calling the hijackings by their mechanics while withholding the category is like describing a bank robbery as a series of withdrawals. Technically tidy. Morally off.
Some editors worry about consistency across conflicts. If you use the word here, must you use it everywhere? Not necessarily. Consistency should follow criteria, not fear. Listed organization. Civilian targeting. Political or ideological goal. Coordinated violence. When those boxes are checked, the newsroom can speak in its own voice without turning into a ministry of slogans.
We bear witness. But we do not ourselves designate specific groups as terrorists, or specific acts as terrorism, because these words are so loaded with meaning, politics and emotion that they can end up being impediments to our journalism.
– Public affairs statement summarizing the house policy
Read that again slowly. Bearing witness is the vocation. The second sentence treats the central category of the event as a contaminant. I do not buy it. Emotion is not the enemy of accuracy. Sometimes emotion is the residue of accuracy. People died in fire and falling steel because a network wanted spectacle and fear. A sentence that cannot carry that fact is not more professional. It is less complete.
What Opposition Critics Want And What Would Actually Help
Conservative voices demanded an apology and the removal of the official who wrote the reminder. That is the usual endgame in a political media fight. Fire someone. Issue a paragraph of regret. Move on. I am skeptical that a scalp solves the underlying habit. Habits live in style guides, training decks, and the quiet praise editors give for “restraint.”
What would help more is a public, specific exception for cases that already carry legal designations and overwhelming factual consensus. Anniversary coverage of 9/11 should be at the top of that list. So should other attacks where courts, intelligence services, and allied governments have already done the designating work. Attribution can remain the default for fast-moving, disputed files. Settled history can be named as history.
- Publish the full standards language so the public can see the test, not just the slogan.
- Draw a bright line between breaking news and commemorative reporting.
- Use official listings as a floor, not as a word to be avoided.
- Let survivors speak in their own vocabulary without a newsroom flinch.
- Review whether caution on Hamas-era coverage quietly migrated into 9/11 copy.
None of that requires turning reporters into prosecutors. It requires admitting that some words exist because they fit. Terrorism is one of those words. Hijacking is a technique. Crash is a physical outcome. Terrorism is the purpose that tied the four flights together.
Memory, Anniversaries, And The Temptation To Soften The Past
Twenty-five years is a dangerous age for a national trauma. Enough time has passed that children who were not born then are now adults. Enough time has passed that institutions feel licensed to refresh the tone. Refreshing tone can be healthy. It can also become a kind of polite amnesia.
I keep thinking about the people who still cannot sit through fireworks. About the workers who spent months on the pile. About passengers who fought in a cabin over Pennsylvania and forced a plane into a field so that another building would not come down. If a style note cannot make room for the word that describes why those people were targeted, the style note is serving the newsroom’s comfort, not the public’s understanding.
There is a fashion in parts of the media world for describing violence as if motive were a rumor. Motives are not rumors when the plotters filmed themselves, wrote manifestos, and claimed the work. Al-Qaeda did not hide the category. Western newsrooms should not hide it for them.
How This Lands With Ordinary Readers
Talk to people outside the industry and the distinction sounds academic. They will say, of course it was terrorism. Then they will ask why anyone needed a memo. That gap between public common sense and editorial theory is the real reputation risk. A public broadcaster cannot afford to sound like the last institution on earth that cannot say the obvious sentence.
I’ve found that readers will accept complexity on new wars, contested occupations, and murky militias. They will not accept complexity-as-alibi on a morning that has been documented down to the minute. They smell hedging. Hedging on 9/11 feels like a character issue even when it began as a style issue.
That is why the FBI director’s post traveled. It was not a subtle media critique. It was a moral indictment wrapped in an alliance warning. You can dislike the tone and still admit the underlying point. Partners want to know that the people who tell the official story still recognize the plot for what it was.
A Cleaner Way To Write The Anniversary
There is a path that keeps rigor and drops the pretzel logic. Describe the hijackings. Name the cities. Give the death toll. Then say, without a flinch, that the attacks were terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. Attribute additional claims about strategy, ideology, and current threat levels to officials and scholars. That is not cheerleading. That is sequencing.
Use terrorist attacks as the category. Use hijackings as the method. Use crashes as the physical result. Keep all three. Do not pretend the third word is the only safe one. Safety in language is overrated when the subject is mass murder.
Quote families in their own words. Some will say terrorism every time. Some will talk only about a son or a sister. Both registers belong. The newsroom does not have to launder the first register into the second in order to look balanced.
A practical line for commemorative copy: Category: terrorist attacks Actors: al-Qaeda operatives Method: four coordinated hijackings Result: mass civilian casualties and two collapsed towers Stance: newsroom names the category; officials supply current threat context
What This Fight Is Really About
On the surface, it is a memo. Underneath, it is a contest over who owns the dictionary after a generation of wars, listings, and backlash. Some newsrooms decided that the safest place to stand is one step removed from every charged noun. The FBI director decided that safety, in this case, looks like disrespect.
I side with naming. Not because American officials are always right. They are not. Not because public broadcasters should take dictation from Washington. They should not. I side with naming because the event is not a riddle. Treating it like a riddle twenty-five years later does not protect journalism. It makes journalism look allergic to its own eyes.
If agencies in Canada want a friend in the Bureau, they do not need matching slogans. They need matching seriousness. Seriousness starts with the willingness to say that a listed network murdered thousands of people on purpose. Everything after that can be debated: surveillance powers, foreign wars, airport theater, the long shadow on Muslim communities, the failures that let the plot mature. Those debates get dumber when the opening noun is missing.
The Sentence That Should Not Be Hard
Here is the sentence. On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda carried out terrorist attacks that killed nearly three thousand people. Four planes. Three sites hit. One field in Pennsylvania. Towers down. A wing of the Pentagon burning. Canadians among the dead. Firefighters climbing stairs that no longer exist.
If a publicly funded newsroom cannot put that sentence on the air without borrowing the key adjective from a guest, the problem is not public sensitivity. The problem is a theory of language that has outlived its usefulness on this file. Theories should serve facts. On this file, the facts arrived first, hard and loud, and they have not grown gentler with time.
Anniversary weeks will keep coming. Another ten years. Another twenty. The people who lived that morning will be fewer. The documents will still be there. So will the listings. So will the alliance that was rebuilt in the rubble. The only open question is whether the institutions that narrate the day will sound like they remember it, or like they are trying not to disturb anyone who would rather talk about aircraft and architecture than about terror.
I know which voice I trust. It is the one that can look at the skyline, look at the lists of names, look at the group that claimed the operation, and still manage the plain English that children learned in the days after the attacks. They were terrorist attacks. Saying so is not a political stunt. Refusing to say so, at this late date, is the choice that now requires an explanation.
