No minced beef here ... just a nice juicy 2" porterhouse ...

From the Toronto Sun

Fair and balanced?

How fried does the corporate brain of the CBC have to be to issue a memo like the following one to its news staff a couple of days after the first round of terrorist bombings in London?

Distributed to staff at cbc.ca, after some poor worker bee made the egregious error of referring to the London transit bombings as "terror attacks" -- which the CBC later went in and retroactively changed to "attacks" in the best traditions of the Ministry of Truth in 1984 -- it reads in part:

"'Terrorist' and 'terrorism': use extreme caution before using either word ... Rather than calling assailants 'terrorists', we can refer to them as bombers, hijackers, gunmen (if we're sure no women were in the group (my italics)), militants, extremists, attackers or some other appropriate noun."

Now, it's not even the CBC's policy of refusing to call "terrorists" and "terrorism" terrorists and terrorism because it would be "taking sides" (!?) that's the most ludicrous thing here.

While absurd, that's been CBC practice for years, frequently defended by CBC News editor-in-chief Tony Burman, who's also quoted in the memo. Like the BBC and Reuters, the CBC refuses to call "terrorism" terrorism unless it's attributed to a third party, or contained is a direct quote. But to me, it's the added warning from the CBC that, before using a word like "gunmen" to describe terrorists, CBC staffers must first ensure that "no women were in the group" that places this policy firmly into the realm of Brave New World.

I mean, how far jammed up your own politically correct butt do you have to be not to realize how stupid that sounds?

What's the CBC's big concern here -- that using the term "gunmen" as a substitute for "terrorists" might offend any female "gunpersons" in the group? Surely, it's not a concern about accuracy, because if the CBC was concerned about accuracy , it wouldn't issue orders not to call terrorists ... let's see ... what's the word I'm looking for here? ... oh, yeah ... TERRORISTS.

And in case the CBC hasn't noticed, most terrorists these days aren't "gunmen" or "gunpersons" anyway, but "bombers" which -- oh, happy day -- just happens to be gender neutral, although in fact the bombers are overwhelmingly men.

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