A Media-Fueled Social Panic Over Unmarked GravesNot a single body has been unearthed. But Canadians wouldn’t know it from the false information reported in The New York Times.
Jonathan Kay
22 Jul 2022
“The discovery of unmarked graves at a former Residential School in [the province of British Columbia] and the countrywide awakening it set off have been chosen as Canada’s news story of the year by editors in newsrooms across the country,” reported the CBC last December. It was an apt choice—though not necessarily for the reasons described by the author.
Canada’s unmarked-graves story broke on May 27th, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation reported the existence of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data that indicated regularly spaced subterranean soil disturbances on the grounds of a former Indigenous Residential School that had operated in Kamloops, BC between 1893 and 1978. In addition, the First Nation’s leaders asserted their belief that these soil disturbances corresponded to unmarked graves of Indigenous children who’d died while attending the school.
The story became an immediate sensation in the Canadian media; and remained so for months, even after the GPR expert on whom the First Nation relied, Sarah Beaulieu, carefully noted that the radar survey results didn’t necessarily indicate the presence of graves—let alone graves that had been unmarked, graves of Indigenous people, or graves of children. Contrary to what many Canadians came to believe during that heady period, GPR survey data doesn’t yield X-ray-style images that show bodies or coffins. What it typically shows are disruptions in soil and sediment. Investigators then need to dig up the ground to determine what actually lies underneath.
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I was one of many Canadians who initially got swept up with all of this—in large part because it seemed as if everyone in the media was speaking with one voice, including journalists I’d known and respected for many years. Looking back on the coverage, I note that headline writers mostly skipped over the technical bits about soil dislocations and such, and went straight to “bodies” and “graves.” And the stories often were interspersed with credulous recitations of dubious tales featuring live babies being thrown into furnaces or buried alive.
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But then the weeks and months passed in 2021. Spring turned to summer, then summer to fall, and fall to winter, and … nothing happened. It’s now been 14 months since the original announcement was made about presumed graves in Kamloops, and no physical evidence has been unearthed. No graves. No corpses. No human remains. In fact, as far as I can tell, there doesn’t even seem to be any systematic effort by police or First Nations leaders to commence such investigations. Eventually, it began to strike the general public that this was a very odd way to treat a mass murder scene, even as pundits and politicians refused to change their early, apocalyptic tone.
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Even the most reputable media outlets sometimes get stories wrong, of course, Quillette included. And for the most part, they will publish corrections and clarifications if a fact-checking critic presents evidence of a journalistic error. In particularly egregious cases, they might even retract an article entirely. But the unmarked-graves story is unusual—perhaps even unique—because the faulty coverage has been a systematic feature across the entire Canadian journalistic landscape since the day the story broke. It isn’t limited to one publication, or even to one type of publication.
This herd-driven aspect of the social panic has yielded a perverse incentive structure among journalists, whereby no single media outlet had any interest in walking back its previously published misinformation, because each could evade criticism simply by pointing to the (equally erroneous) work of everyone else. Why take the gratuitous reputational hit that goes along with admitting one’s own mistakes when all your competitors are staying mum?
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/07/22/how-fake-news-in-the-new-york-times-led-to-a-canadian-social-panic-over-unmarked-graves/
