Laying a story to rest

Mike Dash finds that reports of mass graves at a former Canadian residential school had all the hallmarks of a classic moral panic

Alan Murdie

Grave Error How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools) eds. CP Champion & Tom Flanagan True North/Dorchester Books 2023 Pb, 343pp, £12.60, ISBN 9798867599317 On the Whitsun holiday weekend of 1964, riots broke out along the seafronts of British holiday resorts from Bournemouth to Margate. The combatants were several thousand Mods and Rockers, members of rival youth subcultures with differing tastes in music, fashion and personal transport – though they struck many of their elders as equally alien and frightening. In retrospect, the events weren’t that alarming; though there were dozens of arrests, noone was killed. But that was not the way the papers saw it. Leading with screaming headlines, one assured its readers that the younger generation was transforming into “mutated locusts”. Before long, the…

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Fortean Times (Digital) - 1 Issue, 455

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