That wasn't just an own goal.

It was Canadaland's Jesse Brown, kicking the ball into his own net, over and over and over and over again.

It really was that bad. But it was far more mendacious, and surprisingly way more amateurish, than even Jesse Brown’s harshest critics had warned me it would be. The upshot: The Canadaland simulacrum bears only a cheap, heavily redacted, cunningly spliced and disingenously edited resemblance to the actual interview itself.

Subscribers will be aware that I’d agreed to allow Brown to “challenge” me on his Canadaland podcast about the Year of the Graves project, which has brought upon itself a roaring jamboree of weirdness (see my column last week: When narrative replaces facts).

The reaction in Crazytown was incited precisely because of loudmouths like Brown who have a personal interest in making out that the Year of the Graves project was something which it most certainly was not. That interest remains undisclosed in the Canadaland version. All you have to do is listen to the first three minutes of the actual interview, and listen to the Canadaland version, to see what I mean.

Notice what he cut? For one, my impudence in pointing out that he’d hosted a Uyghur genocide denier and Putin fancier last July - all the while declaiming that I might very well be a genocide denier owing to Year of the Graves, and of course he’d have none of that sort of thing on Canadaland, by gosh.

And Canadaland listeners heard nothing about Brown’s apologetics for the lurid fantasies of a deranged, wholly discredited and defrocked United Church cleric in service of insinuating that I was all wrong in an expose I’d written about the guy. And his presumption that the guy had been right about his imaginary archipelago of mass graves at Indian residential schools containing the corpses of thousands of children murdered by priests and nuns in an operation sanctioned by and covered up by prime ministers, the police and the pope.

This guy, last seen pretending to be a "special adviser in common law" to something called the Republic of Kanata. The man is unwell, for God’s sake.

Anyway, all that is here, and I’m so tired of it. I listened to the Canadaland version once, straight through, and lost count after at least a half-dozen instances of cuts and weird edits and omissions, obviously in service of Brown’s reputation. And obvious, too, because of all the skips and pops. An astute listener observed that “at times it is like something out of the Simpsons where words are spliced together to sound like a single sentence/paragraph when they are split by huge swathes of text. . .”

As I’ve had to point out more than once to people who have come to form an opinion about it without even reading it, Year of the Graves wasn’t even about residential schools. It was about the way the mass media pretty much messed up the whole story last summer, from Kamloops to Cowessess to St. Eugene’s to Penelakut and back again, from beginning to end.

It’s true you could say some good came of it: The federal government finally came up with the funds promised six years earlier to properly assess the whereabouts of more than 3,000 children known to have died after being enrolled in the schools, and the funds to properly survey of the graves in the vicinity of more than 130 residential school sites across the country.

But that could and should have been done six years earlier without the violence and the hysteria, and the melodrama with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau taking a operatic knee at what was in fact a Catholic cemetery that everyone knew about. What we needed last summer was a contrite prime minister, not someone play-acting a movie featuring himself as the romantic lead, flouncing from federal building to federal building lowering flags in a story about how it’s always all society’s fault, and never his own. Carson Jerama gets it. The Liberal party has been replaced by a troll farm.

As for journalism about Canada’s residential schools, I highly recommend a segment broadcast by CBS 60 Minutes over the weekend. Anderson Cooper manages to tell a respectful story, without any of the shock-horror tabloid treatment or invention from whole cloth of the sort that dominated last summer’ s pandemonium. Cooper focused on human legacy, the intergenerational trauma that has persisted long after the schools are barely a memory. It’s proper journalism.

I expect this isn’t the last you’ll be reading here about what happened last summer. There are quite a few unanswered questions, and quite a few news organizations just left those questions hanging.

But enough for now.