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Canadian media outlet deletes X post on ‘unmarked graves’ after receiving Community Note

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Shortly after being fact-checked on X, CityNews removed their post and edited their article.   

Specifically, the outlet changed the headline to read “suspected unmarked graves” rather than “unmarked graves.”

Canadian mainstream media outlet CityNews has deleted a social media post claiming  215 “unmarked graves” were found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School three years ago after X’s “Community Notes” feature reminded users that no bodies have actually been found.

In a May 27 article, CityNews recalled the supposed “discovery” of 215 unmarked graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School, only to have their claim corrected by the “Community Notes” feature on X, formerly Twitter, which adds user-inputted context underneath posts to clarify ambiguous or misleading information.

“May 27 marks a grim anniversary,” the outlet originally wrote in a post captured by the Counter Signal“Three years ago, Monday, hundreds of unmarked graves were discovered at a residential school site in Kamloops.”   

However, those on social media were quick to point out that no bodies have actually been discovered on the former school’s grounds, despite millions being spent by the federal government in search of said bodies.

Indeed, while mainstream media and Liberals continue to claim that hundreds of children were killed and secretly buried at the schools, not one body of a former student has been discovered.   

In light of this reality, X added a “Community Note” to the post clarifying that “No remains have been recovered nor have any graves been identified at this time.”

Shortly after being fact-checked on X, CityNews removed their post and edited their article.   

Specifically, the outlet changed the headline to read “suspected unmarked graves” rather than “unmarked graves.” 

As The Counter Signal pointed out, the original version of the article ironically criticized those who believe and spread “misinformation” regarding residential schools, presumably referring to those who refuse to go along with the mass graves narrative due to the complete lack of physical evidence.

In a seeming effort to rectify their own misinformation, an editor’s note was added to the initial piece, which reads:

An initial version of this article stated the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc initial findings, which the Nation said 215 graves had been discovered at the Kamloops Residential School.

Since May 2021, the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc have revised this position, stating that 200 ‘anomalies’ and suspected burial sites have been located using ground penetrating radar.

Even in the clarifying statement, the outlet stopped short of explaining that not a single body has been found at the site.

The Counter Signal also noticed that the outlet swapped out the “related articles” that appeared in the initial piece.

According to screenshots of the first article, related articles featured had headlines that read: “Discovery of children’s remains at former Kamloops school an ‘unthinkable loss’” and “Remains of 215 children found at former residential school.” 

Now, the headlines read: “Vancouverites honour third annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation,” “Chief says grave search at B.C. residential school brings things ‘full circle,’” and “Stó:lō Nation says 158 children died at Fraser Valley residential schools, institutions.”  

Perpetuating hatred towards the Catholic Church by using false narratives  

The one thing CityNews reported accurately was that it has now been three years since the claims of unmarked graves found at residential schools shocked Canadians. 

Since then, over 100 churches have been burned or vandalized across Canada in seeming retribution for the baseless claims. Instead of apologizing for their misleading claims which have driven anti-Catholic sentiment, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal government and the mainstream media have seemed to sympathize with those destroying churches, as evidenced by a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report on the matter.

Canadian indigenous residential schools, while run by both the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, were mandated and set-up by the federal government and ran from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 1996.     

While some children did die at the once-mandatory boarding schools, evidence has revealed that many of the children tragically passed away as a result of unsanitary conditions due to the federal government, not the Catholic Church, failing to properly fund the system.    

Instead of defending the Church against the allegations, politicians and bishops have largely gone along with the mainstream narrative, leaving many Catholics to fend for themselves.

One notable exception is retired Bishop of Calgary Frederick Henry, who last September blasted the blatant “lie” that thousands of missing indigenous children who attended residential schools run by the Catholic Church were somehow “clandestinely” murdered by “Catholic priests and nuns,” and placed in unmarked graves.   

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EU Tightens Social Media Censorship Screw With Upcoming Mandatory “Disinformation” Rules

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From Reclaim The Net

By

This refers not only to spreading “fact-checking” across the EU member-countries but also to making VLOPs finance these groups. This, is despite the fact many of the most prominent “fact-checkers” have been consistently accused of fostering censorship instead of checking content for accuracy in an unbiased manner.

What started out as the EU’s “voluntary code of practice” concerning “disinformation” – affecting tech/social media companies – is now set to turn into a mandatory code of conduct for the most influential and widely-used ones.

The news was revealed by the Irish media regulator, specifically an official of its digital services, Paul Gordon, who spoke to journalists in Brussels. The EU Commission has yet to confirm that January will be the date when the current code will be “formalized” in this way.

The legislation that would enable the “transition” is the controversial Digital Services Act (DSA), which critics often refer to as the “EU online censorship law,” the enforcement of which started in February of this year.

The “voluntary” code is at this time signed by 44 tech companies, and should it become mandatory in January 2025, it will apply to those the EU defines as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) (with at least 45 million monthly active users in the 27-nation bloc).

Currently, the number of such platforms is said to be 25.

In its present form, the DSA’s provisions obligate online platforms to carry out “disinformation”-related risk assessments and reveal what measures they are taking to mitigate any risks revealed by these assessments.

But when the code switches from “voluntary” to mandatory, these obligations will also include other requirements: demonetizing the dissemination of “disinformation”; platforms, civil society groups, and fact-checkers “effectively cooperating” during elections, once again to address “disinformation” – and, “empowering” fact-checkers.

This refers not only to spreading “fact-checking” across the EU member-countries but also to making VLOPs finance these groups. This, is despite the fact many of the most prominent “fact-checkers” have been consistently accused of fostering censorship instead of checking content for accuracy in an unbiased manner.

The code was first introduced (in its “voluntary” form) in 2022, with Google, Meta, and TikTok among the prominent signatories – while these rules originate from a “strengthened” EU Code of Practice on Disinformation based on the Commission’s Guidance issued in May 2021.

“It is for the signatories to decide which commitments they sign up to and it is their responsibility to ensure the effectiveness of their commitments’ implementation,” the EU said at the time – that would have been the “voluntary” element, while the Commission said the time it had not “endorsed” the code.

It appears the EC is now about to “endorse” the code, and then some – there are active preparations to make it mandatory.

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Brownstone Institute

Jeff Bezos Is Right: Legacy Media Must Self-Reflect

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From the Brownstone Institute

By David ThunderDavid Thunder 

I can count on one hand the times I have seen leaders of media organizations engage in anything that could be described as hard-hitting forms of self-critique in the public square.

One of those times was when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on public record, in a letter to the Republican House Judiciary Committee (dated August 26th, 2024), that he “regretted” bowing to pressure from the Biden administration to censor “certain Covid-19 content.” Another was the almost unprecedented public apology in January 2022 (here’s a report in English) by a Danish newspaper that it had towed the “official” line during the pandemic far too uncritically.

We witnessed a third moment of critical introspection from a media owner the other day, when Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and is the largest shareholder of Amazon, suggested in an op-ed in his own newspaper that legacy media may have themselves at least partly to blame for the loss of public trust in the media.

In this context, he argued that his decision not to authorize the Washington Post to endorse a presidential candidate could be “a meaningful step” toward restoring public trust in the media, by addressing the widespread perception that media organizations are “biased” or not objective.

You don’t need to be a fan of Jeff Bezos, any more than of Mark Zuckerberg, to recognize that it is a good thing that prominent representatives of the financial and political elite of modern societies, whatever their personal flaws and contradictions, at least begin to express doubts about the conduct and values of media organizations. Some truths, no matter how obvious, will not resonate across society until prominent opinion leaders viewed as “safe” or “established,” say them out loud.

Bezos opens his Washington Post op-ed by pointing out that public trust in American media has collapsed in recent generations and is now at an all-time low (a substantial decline can be seen across many European countries as well if you compare the Reuters Digital News Report from 2015 with that of 2023 — for example, Germany sees a drop from 60% to 42% trust and the UK sees a drop from 51% to 33%).

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working…Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.

Something we are doing is clearly not working. This is the sort of candid introspection we need to see a lot more of in journalists and media owners. If someone stops trusting you, it’s easy to point the finger at someone else or blame it on “disinformation” or citizen ignoranceIt’s not so easy to make yourself vulnerable and take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror to figure out how you’ve lost their trust.

The owner of the Washington Post does not offer an especially penetrating diagnosis of the problem. However, he does point out some relevant facts that may be worth pondering if we are to come to a deeper understanding of the fact that the Joe Rogan podcast, with an estimated audience of 11 million, now has nearly 20 times CNN’s prime-time audience:

The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the DC metro area.)

More and more, we talk to ourselves. Much of the legacy media has become an ideological echo chamber, as I pointed out in an op-ed in the Irish Times a few years ago. Conversations go back and forth between journalists about things they care about, while a substantial number of ordinary citizens, whose minds are on other things, like paying their mortgage, getting a medical appointment, or worrying about the safety of their streets, switch off.

While there are some notable exceptions, the echo-chamber effect is real and may be part of the explanation for the flight of a growing number of citizens into the arms of alternative media.

The increasing disconnect between self-important legacy journalists and the man and woman on the street has been evidenced by the fact that so-called “populism” was sneered at by many journalists across Europe and North America while gathering serious momentum on the ground.

It was also evidenced by the fact that serious debates over issues like the harms of lockdowns and the problem of illegal immigration, were largely sidelined by many mainstream media across Europe while becoming a catalyst for successful political movements such as the Brothers of Italy, Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France, Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany, and the Freedom Party in Austria.

Perhaps part of the problem is that those working in well-established media organizations tend to take the moral and intellectual high ground and severely underestimate the capacity of ordinary citizens to think through issues for themselves, or to intelligently sort through competing sources of information.

Indeed, even Jeff Bezos, in his attempt to be critical of legacy media, could not resist depicting alternative media exclusively in negative terms. “Many people,” he lamented, “are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions.”

While there is undoubtedly an abundance of confusion and false and misleading information on social media, it is by no means absent from the legacy media, which has gotten major issues badly wrong. For example, many mainstream journalists and talk show hosts uncritically celebrated the idea that Covid vaccines would block viral transmission, in the absence of any solid scientific evidence for such a belief. Similarly, many journalists dismissed the Covid lab-leak theory out of hand, until it emerged that it was actually a scientifically respectable hypothesis.

We should thank Jeff Bezos for highlighting the crisis of trust in the media. But his complacency about the integrity of traditional news sources and his dismissive attitude toward “alternative sources” of news and information are themselves part of the reason why many people are losing respect for the legacy media.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

David Thunder

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society in Pamplona, Spain, and a recipient of the prestigious Ramón y Cajal research grant (2017-2021, extended through 2023), awarded by the Spanish government to support outstanding research activities. Prior to his appointment to the University of Navarra, he held several research and teaching positions in the United States, including visiting assistant professor at Bucknell and Villanova, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Princeton University’s James Madison Program. Dr Thunder earned his BA and MA in philosophy at University College Dublin, and his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Notre Dame.

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