The transition to the new year is conducive to balance sheets. It’s kind of an unwritten tradition. We elect the personality of the year, we choose the event of the year. There is obviously the sporting feat of the year, the film of the year, the singer of the year. Parliamentary columnists distribute their notes to ministers. Even journalists were treated to their little anthology this year. Then there are the lemon prices. In this area, we are living in good years. But there is one forgotten in this shopping list. It’s here ” fake news ” of the year.
The proliferation of social networks has indeed revived what was once called simply false news or, better yet, “intox”. A word which designates an “insidious action on the spirits [pour accréditer une opinion, démoraliser, influencer] », Says The Robert. Remember that intoxication can serve a good cause as well as a bad one. The question is really not there.
In terms of intoxication this year, I do not see how we could do better than the pseudodiscovery last May of a “mass grave” or “mass grave” near a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. As the writer and former journalist Louis Fournier puts it, “today, a multitude of people still believe a hallucinating false news broadcast last May by the media around the world: the bodies of deceased indigenous children were allegedly thrown in. secret in a “mass grave”, even a “mass grave”, near a former Catholic boarding school of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Kamloops, British Columbia ”(The Aut’DayatL, December 3, 2021).
We will learn later that there was no “mass grave” or “mass grave”, but simply anonymous graves or an abandoned cemetery. Thanks to historians Jim Miller and Brian Getter, we indeed know that these children who died in Oblate boarding schools – most of the time from illness and epidemics – very likely had a dignified burial. According to these historians, if these children are “missing”, it is because the Canadian government refused to pay to repatriate the bodies to the families. And with time the crosses which adorned these tombs have disappeared for lack of maintenance.
This is obviously not to deny the suffering represented by these residential schools whose mission was to assimilate indigenous children by removing them from their families. But this invention which gives the story a false smell of extermination camps is found today everywhere in the international press. “Canada divided in the face of mass graves of Amerindian children”, without qualms the regional newspaper South West, published in Bordeaux. The article even speaks of “cemeteries of slaughtered children”!
Not all of them had the rigor of the BBC which, citing the leader of the Cowessess Nation of Saskatchewan, Cadmus Delorme, specifies that they are “graves without inscriptions” (” serious unmarked “) And not a” mass grave “(“ mass grave site “). As Louis Fournier explains, the ambiguous wording of a first press release “led the media to talk about a mass grave, without any denial being made. A month and a half later, on July 15, a new press release now announced the “probable” presence of anonymous graves in a cemetery. But in the meantime, all the media had broadcast this dark story of mass grave ”.
This example illustrates how much, in these times of political radicalization, a part of journalism has become permeable to activism and ideological discourse. It happens to journalism what happens to too many universities, as Tara Henley writes. Our colleague recently left the CBC denouncing the influence on the crown corporation of “a radical political ideology from the great American universities”. She thus joins the too long list of journalists who, like the American Bari Weiss of the New York Times and the French cartoonist Xavier Gorce from World, had trouble with the political correctness of their time.
In a fabulous novel that tells the descent into hell of an antihero in the age of social networks and political correctness (Etampes’ seer, Les Éditions de l’Observatoire), Abel Quentin has found the words to describe what many of those who work in informing and thinking experience in these troubled times.
“The New Powers,” he wrote, “had elevated emotion to the rank of supreme value, suffering as a standard of measurement of the universal. […]. They crushed any antagonistic element without barking. They criminalized the acts without considering the intention. Or rather they deduced the intention of the acts, and cared little about individualizing the punishments. The thickness of lives did not interest them. There were the forces of Evil and there were the forces of Good. “
This book in the form of a political thriller is an extraordinary praise of nuance. The nuance that should be the other name of journalism.