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.
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 remains of 215 children had been found. Many of those early stories, including in this newspaper, made references to 'mass graves'," a phrase that went beyond even Chief Casimir's claims.
Yet right after admitting its failures, the paper speculates, "Perhaps it will be proven, some day, that there are hundreds of unmarked graves at Kamloops" — as if the error here was being a little too hasty to declare what will sooner or later turn out to be true.
After all, that would be the "truth" that fits the narrative The Globe and Mail lays out in the first seven paragraphs of its story, a tale of wicked residential schools and countless First Nations children doomed to a miserable death.
The narrative comes first — the facts must follow.
This time they didn't, but next time?
The narrative isn't going away just because its showcase story has been debunked.
The consequences of the media hype aren't going away, either:
Canadian taxpayers footed the bill to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — real money in U.S. dollars, too — for First Nations groups to investigate "soil anomalies."
The government simply doesn't know where the money went.
As enormous as the fraud here appears to be, worse is the destruction unleashed by arsonists and vandals against Catholic Churches in the story's wake.
Canada's state broadcaster, the CBC, cataloged 33 churches "burned to the ground" between 2021 and 2024, with 24 of those incidents "confirmed arsons."
"A researcher and some community leaders suggest Canada's colonial history and recent discoveries of potential burial sites at former residential schools may have lit the fuse" for these incendiary attacks, the CBC reported.
Yet the media lit the fuse — not only by hyping an outrageous story that was never backed up by evidence but also by laying down a grand narrative that stoked anger at churches.
(And, in typical fashion, although the residential schools were Catholic-run, other churches also suffered from indiscriminate attacks apparently inspired by the story.)
We see this kind of thing too often in America, too.
Unlike the unmarked graves at Kamloops, George Floyd's death was a reality.
But the grand narrative spun by the media for years leading up to the riots perpetrated in Floyd's memory was every bit as irresponsible as the narrative that sold the Kamloops hoax.
Black Americans were not being casually killed by white police officers, and high-profile cases like Floyd's almost always involved individuals who were violently resisting arrest.
American media outlets, like Canada's, have let progressive politics shape the stories they tell — and how they tell stories — and this often leads to violence.
The Globe and Mail has a long way to go before it makes amends, and the same can be said about a shameful number of America's largest news sources, too.
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