Ethics Newsline®

LOS ANGELES
Manufactured timelines, fabricated details, and lazy reporting chipped away at the reputations of two of the nation’s leading newspapers last week, prompting apologies from editors caught off-guard.

In California, the Los Angeles Times fired Eric Slater, an 11-year veteran journalist at the paper, after discovering a wide range of ethical and procedural lapses in a recent story covering the 2002 death of a college student.

Slater’s story included straight-forward factual errors, quotes from sources that could not be verified by the paper, and other flaws, prompting two correction columns and an internal inquiry into the matter.

The Times last week announced it had fired Slater, saying that “beyond the specific errors, the newspaper’s inquiry found that the methods used in reporting the story were substandard.”

On the other side of the country, the Boston Globe severed relations with freelance reporter Barbara Stewart, apologizing for publishing her piece on a Canadian seal hunt that had not actually taken place.

Stewart’s story described a brutal and bloody seal slaughter in the past tense. The Canadian government, which oversees the annual event, complained, noting that the slaughter had been rescheduled due to bad weather.

Stewart told Boston Globe foreign editor Jim Smith that she had prepared the piece in advance, basing the bulk of it on extensive research, fabricating a few details that she assumed would logically happen.

“Clearly, that doesn’t in any way forgive the many errors that took place on her part and our part,” Smith told the Washington Post last week.

While the Stewart incident is embarrassing for the Boston Globe, it may not be “that big a deal,” Dan Kennedy, media writer for the Boston Phoenix, told the Post. “It was an unknown freelancer writing a fairly small story inside the paper, and they took care of it immediately.”

But “no matter how many times this keeps happening, it’s still a shock to editors,” Kennedy added. “You just don’t think people are going to do this.”

The Post notes that a similar dust-up recently hit the Detroit Free Press, which suspended star sports columnist Mitch Albom for writing about a Final Four basketball game a day before it happened.