When Will The New York Times Correct Its Flawed Reporting on ‘Unmarked Graves’?
The same reporter who helped spark Canada’s 2021 social panic has published a new article walking back his original errors—but those mistakes remain uncorrected on the Times’ website.
Earlier today, I published a Quillette article outlining recent developments in the (slow) process by which Canadians have come to terms with the “unmarked graves” social panic of 2021. As noted in that piece, the original scandal was a blockbuster news story, following on claims that the secret resting places of 215 (presumably murdered) Indigenous children had been located on the grounds of a former school in Kamloops, British Columbia. But in the three-plus years that have passed since then, not a single actual body (nor any human remains) has been discovered at the identified locations, much less 215 of them. Despite this, few of the media outlets and politicians who originally hyped the “unmarked graves” scandal have admitted that Canadians were misled (with the notable exception of the National Post newspaper).
Jonathan Kay
Much of the misinformation emerged from popular misconceptions concerning ground-penetrating radar (GPR)—the technology that had been put forward as providing definitive evidence of the graves’ existence. Credulous reporters seem to have been unaware that GPR landscape surveys do not directly indicate graves, much less bodies or skeletons. Rather, they indicate soil dislocations that can be generated by numerous artefacts, including old pipes and tree roots. The only way to determine what actually lies beneath the surface is typically through excavation—a step that hadn’t been taken in Kamloops when the “unmarked graves” scandal first broke (and which, oddly, still hasn’t been done to this day).
Among the many reporters who seem to have been ignorant of GPR’s limitations was Ian Austen of The New York Times, who wrote multiple error-packed stories at the height of Canada’s “unmarked graves” meltdown. Perhaps more than any single journalist, he exacerbated the flow of misinformation, as his erroneous reports lent the authority of the Times brand to the lurid narrative that emerged.
Scandalously, none of his mistakes have been corrected in these stories—despite the passage of almost 40 months since their publication, and despite the fact that (as we shall see) Austen himself now seems to have come to understand the limitations of GPR technology.
I’m not one of those conservative culture warriors who performs an eye roll at the mention of The Times, which I regard as an (otherwise) highly respectable publication. I’ve been a seven-day-a-week print subscriber since the mid-1990s, and have noted with admiration how its editors will correct even small mistakes, such as misspelled names or incorrect dates. And so I am completely at a loss to explain how Austen (whose long and successful tenure at the Times, I should note, is otherwise unblemished) and his colleagues on the Canada desk have managed to avoid editorial accountability on this file.
A partial catalogue of the (uncorrected) errors contained in Austen’s articles include the following:
- His 28 May 2021 article was (and remains) entitled ‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada. In fact, no “mass grave” had been reported—even by the Kamloops-based Indigenous band that had commissioned the original GPR survey. (The term refers to a pit containing a large number of corpses—which, of course, is the opposite of the systematically arranged individual graves that were supposed to have been discovered.) Nor could this mistake be blamed on a Times copy editor, as the headline was plucked straight from Austen’s false claim that the band said it had discovered “a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children on the grounds of a former residential school.”
Indeed, the band’s chief, Rosanne Casimir, had to then go out of her way to debunk Austen and others on this point, explicitly declaring: “This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented.” But by then, Austen’s “mass grave” language was being parroted by others—including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations. - Later in the same article, Austen elevated the discovery from one of “graves” to one of human “remains”—despite the fact that Casimir had clearly indicated that her forensic evidence consisted only of GPR readings, not excavated materials. If one assumes good faith on Austen’s part (which I do), the only possible way to explain this error is Austen’s incorrect belief that GPR technology is so precise as to indicate the outlines of cadavers and body parts, much like an MRI scan or an X-ray shown to patients in a doctor’s office.
Such a misunderstanding would be consistent with Austen’s morbid claim, contained in the same article, that these (completely hypothetical) “remains” included those of children “as young as three [years old].”
Full disclosure: I’ve been friendly with Austen in the past, and have provided quotes to him for his reporting on other issues. Years ago, I reached out to him for an explanation as to why his articles on the unmarked-graves file hadn’t been corrected, at which point he politely referred me to colleagues at The Times, none of whom would admit that any errors had been made. While preparing this article, I reached out to Austen with a similar inquiry, and will update this text if and when he chooses to respond.
Ed. note: A member of the New York Times corporate communications team delivered a response to Quillette on September 21, which comprised the following statement: “We are confident in the accuracy of our reporting. All of our articles have made it clear that the gravesite findings are based on the analysis of ground penetrating radar and these findings are supported by expert corroboration. That was true in 2021 and remains true today.”
- On 7 June 2021, ten days later, Austen published his second article on the subject, this one so strewn with errors as to make the first seem like a Pulitzer Prize winner by comparison. These mistakes included the subtitle, which led off with a reference to “the discovery of the remains of hundreds of children.” Equally false was Austen’s second-paragraph claim that “the remains of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, have been discovered on the grounds of three former residential schools,” as well as his third-paragraph claim that “the remains of 751 people, mainly Indigenous children, were discovered at the site of a former school in the province of Saskatchewan, a Canadian Indigenous group said.” (In this latter case, Austen was referring to the Cowessess First Nation, which had never claimed to have dug up remains, but had merely reported GPR data indicating the presence of possible graves—which, as the band’s chief took pains to note, may have once been marked, given that the GPR survey in question covered a former cemetery.)
- Later in that same article, Austen referred to “bodies” having been “found by the radar”—something that didn’t happen. He also cited Casimir (who’d already given her above-referenced press conference, disavowing Austen’s reports of “mass graves”) to the effect that she was alleging the presence of graves that are “separate” (Austen’s word), not mass graves. Nowhere in this lengthy 7 June article were readers informed that the main driver of the “mass grave” misinformation had been Austen in the first place.
- On June 24, 2021, Austen published another article, co-authored with Dan Bilefsky under the (factually incorrect) title, Hundreds More Unmarked Graves Found at Former Residential School in Canada. This contained the false claim that “the remains of 215 children were found in unmarked graves.”
It should be conceded that some of the most obvious misinformation in Austen’s articles was attributed to third parties, and was not presented to Times readers as fact. But even when it comes to this category, Austen’s editorial choices ranged from merely torqued to utterly indefensible. At one point in his 7 June piece, for instance, the reporter gave air time to the absolutely baseless horror-movie allegation that Indigenous babies were ripped from the bosoms of mothers and “thrown into furnaces”—a conspiracy theory of the type that had been peddled by a defrocked United Church minister named Kevin Annett since the 1990s.
The reason I’ve chosen this moment to chronicle Austen’s journalistic errors is that he’s back with a newly published article on the subject, entitled, What Lies Beneath Canada’s Former Indigenous School Sites Fuels a Debate. And this time, a chastened Austen seems to have done his homework, as evidenced by the lawyerly sub-headline, which begins, “Despite possible evidence of hundreds of graves at former schools for Indigenous children…”
All in all, the word “possible” appears six times. The term “potential” appears seven times—in the form of “potential graves” and “potential gravesites.”
The word “remains” makes an appearance, too—except that this time, Austen bluntly informs us that—in complete contradiction to everything he told readers in 2021—“three years later… no remains have been exhumed and identified.”
It is nice to have Austen back in the world of reality-based journalism. But his admission makes it all the more inexplicable that the Times still refuses to correct his earlier articles.
Even so, Austen does his best to suggest that it’s just a matter of time before at least a few graves will be found. (And just to be clear, this is possible. The practice of memorialising death with custom-carved stone tablets is an expensive and relatively modern practice, and the Canadian landscape is widely dotted with graves whose original wooden markings have succumbed to the elements.)
He also takes care to quote Casimir’s description of unmarked-graves sceptics as “denialists,” a term that has recently been weaponised to protect the original 2021-era unmarked-graves narrative from scrutiny by suggesting that anyone asking inconvenient questions should be placed in the same moral category as Holocaust deniers. Notably, Austen failed to note that Casimir herself recently downgraded her original claims about GPR-detected “children” to GPR-detected soil “anomalies.” How odd that such an important detail couldn’t be fit into an 1,800-word feature that purports to inform readers (as per its headline) on the “debate” surrounding “what lies beneath Canada’s former Indigenous school sites.”
Austen doesn’t repeat the “denialist” epithet in his own words, but he does dismiss sceptics as inhabiting “a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists.” That’s quite an extraordinary thing to write given that no less an authority than the (Indigenous) Chief Justice of the B.C. Supreme Court has publicly accepted the fact that we have no certainty regarding the claimed graves in Kamloops (or anywhere else). Last I checked, he is no “conservative Catholic” or “right-wing activist.”
Nor am I for that matter. I’m just a Canadian who happens to think that the things written about my country should be true, and that stubbornness and professional pride shouldn’t stand in the way of the continent’s most influential newspaper correcting the bungled reporting that appeared in its pages, and which helped set loose a social panic that persists in some form to this day.
