Leaked Emails Show Canadian Media Exec Demanding Journalists Avoid Using Term ‘Terrorist’ in Hamas Coverage

An email from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC), a publicly funded news outlet, instructed journalists to avoid using the word “terrorist” in their coverage of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.

“Do not refer to militants, soldiers, or anyone else as ‘terrorists,'” George Achi, the Director of Journalistic Standards with CBC News, told employees in an email sent midday Saturday. “The notion of terrorism remains highly politicized and is part of the story. Even when quoting/clipping a government or a source referring to fighters as ‘terrorists,’ we should add context to ensure the audience understands this opinion, not fact,” Achi explained in a note first obtained by the American organization StopAntisemtism.

Achi’s comments come on the heels of video and photographic evidence released by Israel on Sunday morning showing elderly civilians killed at a bus stop in southern Israel, a female captive in the Gaza Strip with bloodied pants, and a gathering of civilians killed at a what appears to be a party.

“We debated whether or not to share these horrific images, but the world needs to know what we are up against,” Israel’s official social-media account on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, wrote. “These aren’t ‘freedom fighters.’ They are Hamas terrorists, but no different than ISIS terrorists. Same tactics, different names. Butchering families, kidnapping grandmothers. Desecrating bodies.”

“Help us get this message out.”

Chuck Thompson, the Head of Public Affairs for CBC, told National Review, “As was made clear in the email you saw, CBC News attributes the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ to authorities, politicians and other officials who use these terms. There is no ban on these words. However, we ourselves avoid declaring specific groups terrorists, in line with the policies of many reputable news organizations and agencies around the world.”

“The focus of our news coverage is on describing exactly what happened in detail, as we have with all that has transpired this weekend,” Thompson elaborated.

International news outlets, including the BBC and New York Times, have come under scrutiny in recent days for their early coverage of the ongoing war in Israel. The former invited Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian writer, to speak during the early hours of the Hamas invasion, during which he accused Israel of committing genocide without intervention from the host.

Alareer has an extensive record of making antisemitic remarks online, including comparing Israel’s missile defense system, Iron Dome, to Nazi Germany’s use of gas chambers. “Zios are the enemy of the free and decent people around the world,” the academic wrote on another occasion.

Hen Mazzig, an influential Jewish personality on social-media, blasted the publicly-funded British broadcasters after issuing an alert about an Israeli airstrike in Gaza without a broader context. “6 hours after Hamas launched a war on Israel, nationwide massacre of Israeli families, kidnapping Jewish mothers and babies, execution of young Jewish women, this is what the media can come up with?” Mazzig wrote on X.

Commentators similarly condemned the Times for its inclusion of articles in its wartime coverage diminishing Hamas’s targeting of civilian deaths and hostage-taking. “For some Gazans, Saturday morning’s surprise Palestinian attack into southern Israel seemed a justified response to a 16-year Israeli blockade,” Raja Abdulrahim wrote in an article titled “Gaza Has Suffered Under 16-Year Blockade.”

A Times news alert sent to mobile subscribers similarly featured skewed language given the developments. “Nearly 300 people have been killed in Gaza and Israel since this morning’s attacks,” the note reads.

“Twitter has become terrible. But the depressing truth of it is that anyone who spends five minutes of here gets a basic sense of the barbarity of what just happened in Israel. Anyone who spends five minutes browsing the headlines of NYT, WaPo, WSJ and Guardian has no idea,” journalist Yascha Mounk wrote on social-media Saturday morning.