In May 2021, the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc people , an indigenous tribe in southern British Columbia, announced the discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of 215 indigenous children at former Catholic residential schools. Citing “anomalies” detected by ground-penetrating radar and the community’s assurance that the atrocity had been confirmed, the announcement garnered global media coverage and sparked a nationwide cultural backlash against the Catholic Church.

In the ensuing months, dozens of Canadian churches were torched (Prime Minister Trudeau described this as “understandable”). Anti-Catholic hate crimes rose by 260%. Priests and nuns were spat at in the streets. Worldwide sentiment toward Catholics plummeted to evermore profound depths. Suddenly, former Catholic residential school students in Canada were being referred to as “survivors” — as though these schools were the moral equivalent of Nazi concentration camps.

Those who questioned the existence of these mass graves or critiqued the ensuing moral panic were labeled as “residential school denialists.” Divergence from the official narrative was grounds for termination , cancelation , and dismissal . The mass grave discovery was, in the eyes of many, the Canadian equivalent of the George Floyd murder.

For his part, Trudeau did everything in his power to stoke the controversy for his own benefit. He demanded an apology from the Vatican with a quivering voice on behalf of the indigenous children ( which he incidentally received from Pope Francis ); he ordered flags to be flown at half-mast for six months; he even visited one of the supposed mass graves for a ghoulish photo-op with a teddy bear in hand . To say nothing else, Trudeau is adept at seizing every opportunity to cement his bona fides as a progressive culture warrior and punish his political foes.

The only problem, of course, is that the “mass graves” story has fallen apart in recent weeks. Reporting from the New York Post revealed that excavations of the alleged mass grave sites have produced no human remains . In their rush to leverage a story that was convenient to their preferred ideological agenda, it appears that both the Canadian government and the global news media failed to confirm the facts, and instead relied upon an unverified radar anomaly and ancient rumors.

The mainstream news media has been predictably silent in the aftermath of these developments. It is now standard operating procedure for them to “ghost” a story once reported with vigor after contradictory details emerge. A Google search of the original story yields thousands of items from every major outlet in the world. But virtually no mainstream outlets appear to have covered the recent revelations. So it goes in the 21st century information landscape.

Thanks to this refusal to correct mistakes, most people still believe that Michael Brown had his arms raised in surrender before he was shot to death by police in Ferguson, Missouri, when in fact, he’d been attacking a police officer and reaching for his gun . Most people still believe that Nick Sandmann and his classmates from Covington Catholic High School mocked a Native American man on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 2019 by standing in his face, when in fact, it was the Native American man who’d gotten in Sandmann’s face . Had the truth of Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax been any less preposterous, there’s little doubt they’d have glossed over the truth of that story, too.

To be sure, no amount of apologies or corrections to shoddy reporting could restore the churches that have been incinerated, nor repair the reputations that have been destroyed as a result. But for once, it would be refreshing to see the news media summon the courage to try — at least out of respect for the indigenous individuals whose legitimate grievances are denigrated by this journalistic disaster.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, The Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.