A Mass-Graves Myth Is Media Malpractice Authored by Daniel McCarthy via PJ Media, A hoax costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and appears to incite arson attacks against dozens of churches. No, this isn’t the latest headline out of Minnesota – look a little further north. Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 In 2021, at a time when media throughout the Western world were still in a state of agitation after the killing of George Floyd, Canadian outlets picked up a story too sensational not to be true: Hundreds of indigenous First Nations children had been buried in unmarked graves at residential schools run by the Catholic Church in British Columbia. The Kamloops Indian Band sent around a press release that “confirmed” it. The statement claimed the remains of 215 children had been found with the help of an expert using ground-penetrating radar. “We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify,” said the band’s chief, Rosanne Casimir. “Some were as young as three years old,” she continued, asserting “the final resting place of these children” was in the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Only it wasn’t. No human remains have been found at Kamloops, as media that fanned the flames of the story now admit. Even now, Canada’s biggest daily paper, The Globe and Mail, phrases its retraction in cagey terms. “There has been no public confirmation of the discovery of any human remains,” the paper conceded on May 30. That funny phrasing leaves one wondering, is there private confirmation of human remains – another “knowing,” perhaps? The Globe and Mail editorial, titled “There is no reconciliation without truth,” is a masterpiece of embarrassed equivocation, lamenting conditions for First Nations children at Canada’s residential schools and even insisting the absence of bodies “does not mean children did not die there” before finally, eight paragraphs into the story, taking a smidgen of responsibility: “The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge” the story, the editorial board concedes. “The initial headlines and stories in the media simply stated as fact that the…​Read More