Oh those zany Times reporters, they just can't help making stuff up even when they change papers. But, I'm sure, as cBS would say, it may not be factual but it's accurate.
A
Boston Globe freelance writer who was axed this week for fabricating part of a story had worked for a decade as a New York Times reporter.
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.
The Times would not give any reason why Stewart left.
Among her more noteworthy assignments at the Times were a number of the paper's ``Portraits of Grief'' vignettes about 9/11 victims.
The veracity of its journalism is a sensitive topic at the Times - badly burned by the Jayson Blair scandal two years ago. A rash of fabrications and plagiarisms by Blair plunged the venerable institution into one of the deepest crises in its history.
Editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd left the paper, and the Times instituted a ``public editor'' to maintain standards.
Stewart, in a story that appeared on Page 8 of the Globe on Wednesday, gave an apparent eyewitness account of this year's seal cull. She described how ``the ice and water turned red'' as ``hunters on about 300 boats converged on ice floes, shooting harp seal cubs by the hundreds.''
The account, however, was fabricated. The cull didn't happen that day. It was postponed due to bad weather.
He said Stewart has since told the Globe: ``I don't know why I did this. I've never done anything like this before.''
Stop me before I lie again. Thanks Boston Herald.
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