The FN Media Fiasco: Manufactured Truth Is No Truth At All

Breaking: Canadian Nunavut Sen. Nancy Karetak-Lindell has amended Bill C-9 by criminalizing "Downplaying residential school harms" or "residential school denialism. She proposes a minimum two-year jail term”

To paraphrase a Mark Twain chestnut, there are three kinds of lies. Lies. Damn lies. And Canadian reporting.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. The tradition of honest reporting based on dogged research and immune to intimidation was a hallmark of the craft. Imperfect, yes, but reliably persistent. As just one example in 1966 Toronto Star reporter Robert Reguly tracked down “mystery woman” Gerda Munsinger in Berlin, nearly bringing down the government of the day over her sexual connections to both Soviets and Canadian cabinet ministers.

As another example, during our time at CBLT in the 1990s we exposed the corruption of Alan Eagleson at the NHL Players Association in the face of hostility to the story at Hockey Night in Canada and a number of political levels. It took eight years and death threats before Eagleson was convicted of fraud in Canada and the U.S.

But that was a country long ago and far away. Today’s media is ensnared in traps of their own making, accepting government funds while pontificating instead of reporting. If there’s a crisis of confidence in the nation blame much of the electronic and print media who eagerly regurgitated propaganda from the Trudeau and now Carney Liberals. Canadians fish from a single river of information and so think there’s just one fish you can catch.

Critical reporting is now largely left to independent podcasters like Matt Gurney and reporters like Sam Cooper There are exceptions of course. But nothing more damning than the performance of Canada’s quivering journalism over the alleged discovery of residential school graves in 2021. The exploitation of white liberal guilt by elements in the First Nations and their political supporters became one of abject shame for the profession.

The story was straightforward. As described by U.S. under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers, “In 2021, Canadian media and institutions basically hallucinated the discovery of 215 children’s bodies in a mass grave near a former Catholic residential school. The evidence: radar saw soil disturbances that could have been tree roots. A wave of church arsons ensued.” 

But nothing could be that honest in Trudeau’s Canada. Rapidly the prime minister staged a photo op of himself with a teddy bear in the alleged graveyard. He then went to the UN to accuse his citizens of genocide. He lowered the Canadian flag for SIX months to underline his narrative that babies were killed and buried clandestinely by fellow students at midnight or burned in furnaces.

The proof? None. While the truth and reconciliation movement accepted lurid verbal testimony of horror in Kamloops and elsewhere, there was never a police report filed of a child murdered or buried outside church property.

Since the story was broken nationally and by the international press not one graveyard has been excavated— even after the feds provided millions for the operation. The wild stories of depravity have been allowed to foment in the public realm. 

New York Times, May 28, 2021: “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” Washington Post, June 24, 2021: “Hundreds of Graves Found at Former Residential School for Indigenous Children in Canada.” CBC, June 30, 2021. “182 Unmarked Graves Discovered Near Residential School in B.C.’s Interior, First Nation Says.” The Guardian, UK, July 13: “A First Nations community in western Canada has announced the discovery of at least 160 unmarked graves close to a former residential school.”

The self-inflicted result, writes @natashamontreal “Children have been force-fed a diet of revisionist history, self-loathing, and performative t-shirt wearing, in no small part because of newspapers like the Globe and Mail publishing dozens of articles lying about the ground abnormalities and pushing the mass graves narrative. Over 100 Churches have been burned or vandalized across Canada since this lie was played on repeat.”

All the while given credibility by a gullible media corps which shouted “racist" at attempts to bring sanity to the story. Actually, there were independent sources who resisted the censorship. True North, Frontier Centre, Nina Green, The Dorchester Review cast some of the first scrutiny on the dubious evidence. Professor Frances Widdowson was so dogged in her pursuit that her disgraceful employers at Mount Royal University fired her. 

Ditto Jim McMurtry fired by his school board for digging too deep. And Rebel media were onsite, resisting the cringing posture of the legacy media.

Among the major media outlets Terry Glavin of the National Post showed how the world’s media got it wrong as early as a May 2022 article. But with NDP MPs threatening jail on “denialists” the media momentum was lost. Glavin’s colleagues in the legacy media put the politics of reconciliation ahead of their primary responsibility, getting the facts correct. CBC, CTV and Global toed the same line. 

For fear of sparking militants in the indigenous community the Globe & Mail stood back and let the world continue believing that Canada was still a rogue, racist hellhole.  On May 30, 2021, the Globe and Mail published an op-ed by Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond. “The discovery of a mass gravesite at the former residential school in Kamloops is just the tip of the iceberg.” Even a week ago the Globe & Mail was still referring to the discovery of "the remains of 215 former residential students”. 

But then, under a headline saying “There is no reconciliation without truth”, the paper has finally admitted that maybe they’d been a tad late in finding their voice on the story. “The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge, that assertion (of the confirmation of human remains of 215 children). The initial headlines and stories in the media simply stated as fact that the remains of 215 children had been found.” 

Many of those early stories, including in this newspaper, made reference to “mass graves” (a historically fraught phrase that does not appear in the Tk’emlúps 2021 press release).

The paper that kept “denialism” on the boil tried to distract from getting its ass kicked by NatPost and people like Jim McMurtry. 

Were the Rez School graves story an outlier, this above might be forgiven., But it ran concurrent with the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People at both the federal and provincial levels, installing UNDRIP as equal to Canadian law. 

While the media snoozed UNDRIP was used to assert title on both Crown and private territory. The bumbling BC NDP government of David Eby opened the door to the indigenous having approval on Crown Lands and on the titles of homeowners around the province. 

Instead the media obsesses on Elbows Up stunts and Carney’s latest MOU with Mongolia or Cote d’Ivoire. Added to Canadian media’ obsequious repeating of stories from their U.S. colleagues the past decade it demonstrates a media not worthy of the serious assignment given them under law. A purchased media is a corrupt media. And Canadians sorting through the latest news are worse for it.

“Peter Menzies sums up the car crash. “With but a handful of exceptions, the days of a free and independent press in Canada are over. Now that the public is being asked, through the government, to pay our media’s bills, it’s only fair that we have a say in how they run their businesses. We might as well get on with it,”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his 2023 book Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, was voted a Top 20 greatest professional hockey books of all time by bookauthority.org . https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1770415300?linkCode=gs2&tag=uuid0a1-20 His previous book with his son Evan, Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books at https://www.amazon.ca/dp/106980270