Barbara Stewart, a Boston Globe freelancer who in a Globe story published last week made up details about a bloody Canadian seal hunt that hadn't happened yet, worked for 10 years as a reporter for the New York Times, whose parent company owns the Globe. The disturbing incident not only reveals lapsed ethics, but profound bias for animal rights activists, and against seal hunters. It also raises questions whether The Times' initial "what, us worry?" response constitutes a circling of the wagons, in light of now-salient concerns that Stewart's decade-long reportage there should be painstakingly authenticated.

The story has now been removed from the Globe's online archive, however, the Google-cached full version, here, includes this egregious fiction near the top.

Hunters on about 300 boats converged on ice floes, shooting harp seal cubs by the hundreds, as the ice and water turned red. Most of the seals were less than 6 weeks old.

The "balanced" body of the story is respectable enough, but is badly undermined by the phony opening. The Boston Herald notes:

The account...was fabricated. The cull didn't happen that day. It was postponed due to bad weather. Helen Donovan, executive editor of the Globe, said the paper first learned of a possible problem when it was contacted by a Canadian government agency....Donovan said the paper reviewed Stewart's earlier stories for the Globe and "didn't find any errors.''

The CBC reports the hunt actually began Friday April 15, two days after The Globe ran Stewart's story. Too bad Stewart was not there to report on what actually happended, as opposed to just pretending she had been - shades of Jayson Blair. As of Monday morning April 18, hunters were still 95,000 to 100,000 seals under the yearly quota.

The Globe acknowledged Stewart's fabrication in this Editor's Note. But the matter should not be allowed to fade away quickly for several reasons.

The Stewart-Globe episode is about more than another MSM fabulist biting the dust. It is also about the bias underlying the fabulism. And given the initial stiff-arm of the Times to checking on Stewart's 10-year archive there, it as well underscores the ongoing, and keening arrogance of a mainstream media whose credibility has already been badly wounded by a series of scandals involving either fabrication, or sheer sloppiness, as in the CBS-TV/Dan Rather/"60 Minutes" debacle over a faked memo on President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Stewart was a 10-year veteran of the New York Times, home of fired serial fabulist Jayson Blair and his disgraced mentor Howell Raines. She contributed to the Times' noted series on 9/11 victims, titled "Portraits of Grief," and authored this article about the assignment for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2002.

Again, The Herald:

Barbara Stewart worked as a reporter on the Times' metro desk between October 1994 and May of last year, Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed last night. Stewart was dropped by the Globe as a freelancer this week after she was caught making up part of a story about seal culling off the coast of Canada. The Times last night would not say whether a probe was under way into Stewart's work there. "Should any questions be raised, we will check them," Mathis said. The Times would not give any reason why Stewart left.

Ms. Mathis: Excuse me, please: but consider questions raised. A 10-year Times veteran who fabricates a sensational lede on a highly controversial topic for a newspaper owned by The Times' parent company should have the entire body of her Times work put under systematic and thorough review. Lacking this review, more-than-reasonable doubts will linger.

An ancillary but also crucial issue now is, under what circumstances did Stewart leave The Times? Was it voluntary, or not? Mathis' stonewall here to The Herald raises more questions than it answers. If The Times - which has suffered serious ethical lapses in recent years - is smart, it will seek to credibly settle all these matters, and soon.

Stewart's latest work surely does not inspire confidence. As these in-depth seal hunt FAQs from the CBC show, Stewart's manufactured lede image of gun-toting seal hunters brutally shooting seals to death does not jibe with a 2002 Canadian Veterinary Journal report which found that 98 percent of the seals taken in the annual Atlantic hunt are killed humanely. Clubbing is one preferred method, and where guns are used, federal regulations stipulate death be quick.

According to the Atlantic Seal Hunt 2003-2005 Management Plan of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the size, weight, muzzle velocity and guage of guns used to kill seals are regulated to insure quick and humane killings when guns are used, as Stewart's Globe story noted, lower down. Such nuances go a bit beyond Stewart's crude and made-up top-of-story imagery of waters filled with the then non-existent blood of "hundreds" of seal pups.

Further, since 1987, killing of white harp seal pups has been banned, though anti-seal hunt groups still feature their pictures on their Web sites and fundraising materials. Additionally, for some sealers, the hunt is up to one-third their annual income, in a province with a jobless rate of 15 percent, according to the CBC.

To Stewart's partial credit, she notes many of these nuances in her full story (linked above), but the fabricated lede grafs betray deep bias. It is as though the "other side" is just so much pro-forma "blah, blah, blah" down below. The view clearly seems to be that readers will get the real "message" up top, even if it depends on situational ethics and fictional, as opposed to actual, reportage.

Underlying this latest mainstream media transgression of reader trust is the overt currying of favor with animal rights groups. This is unfortunate. Seals may be cute. But they are, after all, merely marine mammals, and have been a source of food, oil and fur for centuries.

Globe Foreign Editor Jim Smith damningly reveals to the WaPo's Howard Kurtz that Stewart told him she wrote the bloody on-scene descriptions of seal cub shootings in advance of the event.

Stewart said she had done much of the reporting about the hunt in advance and "wrote a top assuming it was going to start on Tuesday," Smith recalled. He said she could not remember whether she spoke to a hunter who said the annual event was about to begin on Monday night or Tuesday morning. "Clearly, that doesn't in any way forgive the many errors that took place on her part and our part," Smith said.

Globe foreign editor Smith said to The Herald that since being found out, Stewart had told The Globe:

"I don't know why I did this. I've never done anything like this before.''

It is clear enough why Stewart did what she did, even if she pretends not to know. She thinks seal hunters, and the seal hunt, are vile. What else could account for the fictionalized editorializing masquerading as reportage? Further, that she has "never done anything like this before" cannot actually be known until the New York Times and Boston Globe conduct a full and transparent review of Stewart's work. The Times owes that to its readers after the Blair affair. At least several dozen of Stewart's Times pieces, spread across her 10-year tenure there, should be thoroughly investigated by that paper's internal watchdogs.

Most disingenuous is Stewart's self-defense in a Monday (April 18) Post piece by Kurtz.

Barbara Stewart, the Boston Globe freelancer dropped over her story about a Canadian seal hunt that had not yet taken place, says she never meant to deceive anyone. She just never checked back to learn that the scheduled hunt had been delayed by bad weather. "The whole situation, while resulting from an egregious, massive, stupid [screwup] on my part, unbelievable carelessness, was nevertheless not malicious fabrication as in: pretending I was there and deliberately making up a whole scene and attempting to pass it off," Stewart says by e-mail.

Nonsense. Pretending she was there, deliberately making up a whole scene, and attempting to pass it off was precisely was Stewart did. That Kurtz should weave this insulting denial into a piece on media scandals with no retort shows his own eagerness to minimize the Stewart affair.

Meanwhile, The Globe, which previously discharged writer Patricia Smith for admitted fabrication and columnist Mike Barnicle for suspected fabrication following plagiarism, owes its readers a fully transparent investigation intro the veracity of Stewart's work for them, despite Helen Donovan's glib assurance the paper reviewed Stewart's previous Globe stories and "didn't find any errors."

Here's one of Stewart's recent Globe pieces for starters; and another. Stewart has only done a handful of pieces for The Globe. This emphasizes even more accutely the need for a thorough review of the main body of her work over the last decade, at the Times.

Stewart's fabricated and propagandistic opening also serves as a reminder that the mainstream media must more fairly and ethically report on Canada's controversial annual Atlantic harp seal hunt.

A good place to start is the above-linked DFO Atlantic Seal Hunt 2003-2005 Management Plan. Seal hunting in the area began in the 16th Century. The Canadian Atlantic harp seal population has grown from 2 million in the 1970s to more than 5 million now. With some 300,000 killed per year in three separate hunts (Magdalen Islands, Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Newfoundland) and present birth rates, the population is staying well above the mandated 70 percent of the maximum observed count of 5.5 million. The 70 percent mark would be 3.85 million, the estimated population in 2006 will be 4.7 million, according to DFO.

Rather than urging U.S. residents to boycott Canadian seafood in retaliation, anti-seal hunt activists might want to have a word with Europeans. That's the big market for seal oil and skins. The meat? It goes mainly to Asia, as it's outlawed in the U.S.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at April 16, 2005 12:37 PM

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