Our Canadian friends tell us, that it's one of those things they notice if they've spent any meaningful time watching the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) coverage of major terrorist attacks: the ritualistic tiptoeing, the linguistic gymnastics, the way the word "Islam" gets surgically extracted from sentences where it would otherwise naturally belong. And nowhere is this more glaring than in their treatment of September 11th. Just like our own ABC.
The question isn't really about journalistic standards or editorial guidelines, though those get trotted out as cover. The question is about what happens when an institution's entire moral and ideological framework collides with an inconvenient reality so massive it can't be ignored but also can't be honestly named.
The CBC, like most legacy broadcasters in the West, has spent decades building its identity around a particular vision of multiculturalism, one where all cultures and belief systems are fundamentally equal in dignity, except the West which is eternally flawed, where critique of minority groups is treated as a precursor to violence, and where the gravest sin an institution can commit is being perceived as racist. It's simply what the institution is. It's baked into hiring practices, editorial standards, story selection, the language guides that tell journalists which words are permissible and which are career-ending.
Then along comes 9/11. Nineteen men, acting on explicit theological instruction, citing specific religious texts, motivated by a well-documented radical ideology, fly planes into buildings and murder nearly three thousand people. The most spectacular act of terrorism in recent human history, carried out allegedly in the name of radical Islam, justified through radical Islamic jurisprudence, celebrated across significant swaths of the Islamic world, by the same radicals; not most Muslims of course.
For an institution like the CBC, this creates an unresolvable tension. You can't not cover it. It's the defining event of the young century. But you also can't cover it honestly without saying things that violate every principle your institution has encoded into its DNA over the past forty years. You can't say "this was radical Islam" because that sounds like you're indicting a people. You can't explore the theological drivers because that requires acknowledging that ideas have consequences, that belief systems are not interchangeable lifestyle accessories, and that some doctrines, when taken seriously by serious people, produce predictable outcomes.
So, what do you do? You build an elaborate architecture of evasion. You talk about "terrorists" without adjectives. You discuss "extremism" as though it's a free-floating psychological condition that just happens to cluster in certain populations. You frame it as a response to foreign policy, to colonialism, to alienation, to anything except the thing the perpetrators themselves keep telling you it's about. You bring on experts who specialise in "deradicalization," because they can discuss the problem without naming the cause.
The fear of "racism" functions here as what you might call a cosmic weapon: something so existentially threatening to the progressive institutional identity that avoiding it overrides every other consideration, including factual accuracy. It's not that CBC journalists are stupid or dishonest in any simple sense. It's that they're operating within a framework where being called racist is worse than being wrong. The accusation of racism doesn't just threaten your career; it threatens your sense of yourself as a good person, your standing in your social world, your entire moral self-conception. No fact is worth that cost.
And so the coverage becomes what it is: a decades-long exercise in describing a religiously motivated mass murder without ever quite getting around to the religion part. The hijackers become "men" who were "radicalised" through some mysterious process that apparently has nothing to do with the contents of the books they read or the sermons they attended or the civilisation-level doctrines they explicitly invoked in their farewell videos. The ideology becomes a ghost; present everywhere, visible in every frame, but never named, never analysed, never treated as what it actually is.
What makes this particularly revealing is the asymmetry. When a white supremacist shoots up a mosque in Quebec City, the CBC has no trouble identifying the ideological motivation. The manifesto gets analysed, the online radicalisation pipeline gets mapped, the belief system gets named and shamed. And rightly so. But the asymmetry tells you everything. One kind of ideological violence can be discussed honestly because discussing it carries no risk of the ultimate sanction. The other kind cannot, because the people who run institutions like the CBC have organised their entire moral universe around the proposition that some groups are beyond criticism and some explanations are off-limits regardless of their truth value.
The deeper problem is that this institutional cowardice has consequences beyond bad journalism. When you refuse to name a problem accurately, you can't solve it. When you treat the avoidance of social discomfort as more important than understanding reality, you guarantee that the reality will reassert itself in uglier and more surprising ways. The people who notice the gap between what they see and what they're told become cynical about all institutions. The people who don't notice become incapable of understanding the world they live in. Neither outcome is healthy for a society that needs to actually grapple with the fact that some ideologies, taken seriously, lead to planes flying into buildings.
The CBC's 9/11 coverage, stretched across a quarter century now, stands as a kind of monument to a particular failure of nerve, the failure to say what everyone knows, to analyse what's plainly visible, to treat audiences as adults capable of distinguishing between critique of an ideology and hatred of the people who hold it. It's a failure born not of malice but of fear. The fear of being called the one thing the progressive establishment cannot abide being called, "racist." And so, the coverage continues, year after year, anniversary after anniversary, a ritual of avoidance performed with the solemnity of people who have convinced themselves that not seeing is the same as not knowing. And as I said, most of the above comments applies as well to the ABC.