The record corrects on 'unmarked graves' hysteria

National Post, 02 June 2024

Bad journalism is to blame, but good journalism is finally counteracting it

There is much lamenting — and much to lament — about the state of journalism in Canada. How can the truth be found, the common good served, if our networks and newspapers are in a parlous state? Who will provide the information we need when digital giants vacuum up the revenue that in the past provided for the essential-but-not-click-generating work of careful and dogged reporting?

So a bit of good news on the reporting front is most welcome in this new media world.

This past week marked the third anniversary of the dramatic announcement that 215 “unmarked graves” had been discovered near a former residential school in Kamloops. It was a global news story which had a significant impact in Canada. It was also a great media malpractice.

Many things were reported then that were not only not true, but had not even been claimed to be true by anyone. Recall the monstrously misleading headlines about mass murder and mass graves? For example, from the Toronto Star on 28 May 2021: “The Remains of 215 Children Have Been Found.”

Not true. No one ever claimed that remains had been found. Many people assumed that the “unmarked graves” held children, but the ground-penetrating radar employed cannot reveal if a body is in the soil, let alone whether it is a child or adult.

Tales of mass murder and mass graves produced a massive moral panic. Marches were held, symbolic children’s shoes were assembled, churches were burned and vandalized, hundreds of millions were committed to investigating further mass graves, the prime minister ordered flags at every embassy abroad and federal building at home to be lowered for nearly six months, a new federal holiday was instituted, the Catholic Church issued (another) apology and Pope Francis came to visit.

How can it now be that the anniversary of something so globally momentous passed so quietly this week?

It’s because the great media malpractice has been answered by journalists, a broader category in the digital world, who provided the effective response. It’s an inspiring David and Goliath tale of how courageous, good journalism beat out conforming, bad journalism.

We can take some pride here at the National Post, for on the first anniversary we published the remarkable reporting of Terry Glavin, who demonstrated exactly how media malpractice had produced a moral panic.

But aside from that, the work was carried out by writers — academics, reporters, amateur researchers and dogged citizens — outside of the legacy media. The story unfolded in C2C Journal, Dorchester Review, True North, Western Standard, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and Quillette.

Last December, a single volume collecting much of this work was published: Grave Error: How the media misled us (and the truth about residential schools), edited by Christian Champion, founder and publisher of the Dorchester Review, and the well known academic and political player, Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus at the University of Calgary.

Those outlets which had perpetrated the original malpractice took a pass. The legacy media ignored the book, and Canada’s major book retailers did not sell it.

The National Post again was an exception. Barbara Kay wrote about it here in January, pointing out its astonishing sales, limited mostly to Amazon.ca.

“In Canada, 500 sales constitute an academic bestseller,” wrote Kay. “True North’s founder and editor-in-chief Candice Malcolm told me that Grave Error sold around 500 copies on the first day, and nearly 2,000 copies in the first week alone. At one point in December, Malcolm said, it was the no. 1 bestselling non-fiction book on all of Amazon.ca — outselling books by Prince Harry, Britney Spears and Matthew Perry.”

Even now, months later, it remains #1 on Amazon’s Canadian Literature bestseller list.

Grave Error has established itself as a now indispensable reference. No one who wishes to write seriously — academics or journalists alike — on residential school graves, or residential schools more generally, will be able to ignore it. Despite the lack of support from the pillars of Canadian academe and journalism, it got the story out, and it got the story right.

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