“Meaning” is a feature, not a bug
“If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?”
Abraham Lincoln is said to have once posed the question. And to have answered: “Four.” Because “calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”
The anecdote comes to mind in light of the upcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11 and a leaked Canadian Broadcasting Corporation internal memo instructing staff to “not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.”
Instead, the memo instructed, what happened on 9/11 should be described as follows:
“The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, DC, Pennsylvania and Manhattan. The World Trade Center… was destroyed.”
The memo was signed, “BB,” apparently Mr. Basem Boshra, CBC News’s senior director of journalistic standards.
The CBC is funded by the Canadian government to the tune of some $1.38 billion annually.
There was really nothing new in the memo; it was just a reminder of the CBC’s longstanding policy of avoiding the use of words like terrorist and terrorism because it injures their veneer of impartiality. (Reuters and some other news organizations have similar terminology “standards.”)
“Our focus,” Kerry Kelly, a CBC spokesperson, explained, “is to report the facts of such atrocities with accuracy, clarity and detail; to convey the scale and scope of violent acts wherever they occur; to quote the people affected, and to convey the views of officials and experts on these events.”
“We bear witness…” Ms. Kelly quoted from a 2023 editor’s blog, “but CBC News does not itself designate specific groups as terrorists, or specific acts as terrorism, regardless of the region or the events, because these words are so loaded with meaning, politics and emotion that they can end up being impediments to our journalism.”
“Loaded with meaning.”
“Meaning,” Ms. Kelly might mull, is not a bug but a feature. It’s not an impediment to accuracy; it is essential to it. Calling ugly things their rightly ugly names is descriptive, not prescriptive.
When a white person shouts anti-black slurs while attacking an African immigrant, the CBC presumably would not object to calling the act racist. And (at least hopefully) when a person gives a Nazi salute and screams “Sieg Heil!” before attacking an identifiably Jewish man, the organization would somehow see its way clear to calling the happening anti-Semitic.
And so, when violence is committed with the express intent to terrorize civilians, it shouldn’t be a terribly big lift to label it what it is.
It’s not like the terrorists are somehow discomfited by having their murders labeled for what they are. Osama bin Laden, who approved and funded the 9/11 attacks, described them as “blessed terror.” So the CBC needn’t worry about hurting anyone’s feelings.
Some defend the odd allergy to the word terrorism on the grounds that the word has a slippery meaning. Except that it doesn’t.
Dictionaries, the UN, the FBI and the European Union, whatever their particular choice of words, all define terrorism as the unlawful use of violence to intimidate a government or population to further political, religious or social goals.
When a word has a definition (as all do), if a shoe fits it, it may be—should be—worn.
And if a news organization won’t don the footwear, it’s not just shirking its duty to transmit all pertinent facts in an informative manner; it’s defining evil down.
And setting further down-defining into motion.
“The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes,” The Free Press’s Nellie Bowles quotes the memo, adding, “By next year it’ll be that it was just a total accident, a setback for passenger plane safety. After that, it’ll have never happened.”
On Friday, the CBC did a bit of backtrack. “After reviewing our current language guidance,” it announced, “we have decided to adjust it to clarify that direct attribution [quoting someone using the word] is not required for describing the historic events of 9/11 as terrorism.”
But it reserved the right, “as new acts of politically or ideologically motivated violence occur in our world,” to “follow the journalistically sound practice of attributing causes and motivations [only] to officials and experts.”
Sorry, CBC. Just as a dog’s tail, no matter what you call it, is a tail, terrorism, no matter what you call it is… you-know-what ●
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