The CBC's big lie: people noticed.

It’s true: CBC said 9/11 wasn’t a terror attack.

I received the email on Wednesday. The source(s) wished to remain confidential. The email was from Basem Boshra, the “Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust at CBC News.” It was addressed to all CBC news staff and was “for internal use only.”

When I read it, I saw why.

“Hello all,” Boshra wrote. “With the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaching and the considerable amount of planned coverage, this is an opportune time to share relevant and longstanding guidance from the CBC Language Guide for the purpose of consistency across all CBC News platforms.”

Boshra offered guidance on punctuation. Then he wrote this, in bold and italics:

“Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks. The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania and Manhattan. The World Trade Center was destroyed.”

I read it again, and again. The September 11, 2001 attacks - in which 2,996 people were murdered by al-Qaeda terrorists - was not, CBC had decreed, “terrorism.”

I let my editors know what I had, and then contacted CBC’s official spokespeople to (a) ask them if the email was authentic and (b) if they had anything else they’d like to say about what was, on its face, ludicrous.

They got back to me, promptly and professionally. It was real, I was told. And: they stood by it. They piously defended it. Other news agencies, they said, had the same policy (insane, but mostly true). And, they added, CBC had long refused to call terrorism “terrorism” (also insane, also mostly true).

We published the story, and it went viral.

The story was picked up around the world. And people got very, very mad at CBC.

A sampling:

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