CBC, Hamas and the terrorist label.

October 19, 2023

The public broadcaster is in Pierre Poilievre’s cross-hairs again following the disclosure of CBC News Editor-in-Chief Brodie Fenlon’s staff e-mail reminding journalists of its long standing policy regarding the term “terrorism” as reporters cover the Hamas assault on Israel and the ensuing war.

Another reason to defund the CBC, said Poilievre; the woke public broadcaster is soft on terrorism. The Conservatives demanded that CBC executives appear before the Heritage Committee to answer for themselves.

Fenlon issued a statement that CBC’s editorial policy mirrors those of other news organizations such as the BBC, Reuters, Associated Press and AFP. Since then, the Washington Post and the Globe and Mail have expressed similar views.

The gist of those policies is that journalists using categorical vocabulary is perceived by many readers as endorsing or condemning news subjects, rather than reporting what is happening. There’s no ban on using the terms “terrorism” or “terrorist” but reporters (although not necessarily opinion columnists) are expected to let the news subjects do the talking, in other words quoting them.

It leads to some awkward writing, to say the least, to omit the adjective “terrorist” unless the rest of paragraph clearly depicts what occurred, i.e. the intentional killing or kidnapping of innocents for political ends. Unless “terrorist” actions aren’t newsworthy which they normally are.

Deciding whether to label Hamas a “terrorist organization” seems to be the lightning rod for controversy.

Hamas unequivocally used terrorist methods on October 7 by killing and kidnapping hundreds of innocents at a youth festival and several kibbutzes in southern Israel. Those would be infants and children; unarmed adults and seniors.

Hamas has sent suicide bombers to Israeli nightclubs. Hamas habitually uses terror tactics to get its way, so why the inhibition about the label?

The answer is that “terror” can be as loaded as it is descriptive for the reader. The loaded part, according to Emilie El Khoury, puts ordinary pro-Palestinian voices at an immediate disadvantage in public debate because they become associated with Hamas terrorism even if they don’t endorse Hamas, its violence or its objectives (which is to destroy the Israeli state). That’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s worth considering.

Personally I don’t care if news organizations call Hamas a terrorist organization. I think they are and I have deduced this from many news reports of their activities over the years.

But of course the terror-label is more than just a moral judgment on them and their activities: it’s newsworthy that other nation-states recognize or send military and civilian aid to Hamas, a de facto government that engages in terrorism.

What I do mind is news organizations falling back into euphemisms that sanitize what Hamas does or who they are. For example, the headline on the BBC explainer of its editorial policy refers to “Hamas militants.” I think we can agree, Hamas are not just militants. Better just to refer to Hamas as “Hamas.” You wouldn’t describe the 9/11 attack in New York as a “militant” attack.

But we should take seriously the BBC/CBC view that it is best for journalists to avoid judgmental or conclusionary vocabulary if possible, so as not to turn away readers who don’t like the judgment but need to learn what the facts really are. Canadian journalism academic Ivor Shapiro has a good piece on this.

To illustrate the point, consider the BBC News coverage of the tragedy of an explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza and the resulting mass casualties, initially reported as an Israeli air strike.

The BBC interviewed military experts and, in the resulting article, said that while the evidence of blame was inconclusive there exists the strong possibility the explosion was the result of a misfired rocket that did not originate in Israel.

In the middle of a war in the constant presence of misinformation, we may never know reliably who is to blame for the deaths. But the point is that if the BBC had been routinely labelling Hamas as a terrorist organization, its investigative journalism might well be dismissed by many on account of its policy.

And finally, some perspective in this moment: it matters far less what news reporting methods we agree upon and more that innocents are dying in Gaza and Israel and I know that is what we are all thinking about right now.

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