|
|
Thank you Barbra for bringing the prevailing tactic of the anti-sealing industry to the forefront of news
coverage. The age old tactic of bullshit has been employed by people for as long as man has walked the earth.
A tactic embraced by the anti-sealing industry to fill their pockets with the
money of the unsuspecting and blindly sympathetic.
Barbra is or should I say was a columnist for the Boston Globe who, up to this point, was like most of us, an
insignificant speck on this chunk of rock hurtling through space. However, on April 13, 2005 Barbra rocketed
into the class of "Hemorrhoid on the ass of Society". Barbra was based in Halifax to "report" on the annual
seal hunt in Newfoundland. This would be the first sign of trouble seeing that St. John's would have been a more appropriate
location.
She wrote her story on the hunt and sent it in and without doing the simplest of checks on its validity, The Boston Globe printed it on April 13th, 2005.
This would have been fine since the hunt was supposed to commence on April 12th, 2005 but it just so happened that the
opening of the hunt was postponed due to bad weather. Here was Barbra's story written as if she had witnessed a hunt
that had not yet happened. I have yet to find anything that hints to
Stewart having some precognitive sense so if she can't see into the future she must be like her other friends
in the anti-sealing industry, a bold faced liar. What I can't understand is that she was there. She was on the door
step of the hunt to do what reporters do, bare witness and report the actual events, but instead she
fabricates the story. This is also a shining example of the state of today's news media. There is something
fundamentally wrong when your selection process of what to print goes something like this, good news
story…nope….good news story….nope….sensationalist bullshit….print it. Unfortunately we live in a time when
sensationalism wins out over the truth. When reporting the 200th murder in a year wins out over some truly
unique event. The least these papers could do is take steps to confirm the stories they publish
and if nothing else be accountable for what they print. For now all they get is a slap on the wrist and have
to stand in the corner for awhile but wouldn't a hefty fine be more appropriate? Maybe then they would care
about the information they print as much as the number of papers they sell.
The Globe ran a correction, and Executive Editor Helen Donovan said,
|
|
"We should have noticed the lack of attribution on a couple of key facts and should have asked questions we
didn't ask. We should have been alert to the fact that something was missing....It's definitely a significant
breach."
|
|
Danger, danger Wil Robinson, "alert to the fact that something was missing", something like the subject of
the story maybe? At least they got one thing right, good old Barbra was canned and if the world be a just place
then she is scrounging out of a dumpster somewhere. Unfortunately with friends like Paul Watson I highly doubt
it. In fact, Paul couldn't move his bloated form fast enough to start back peddling in hopes of lending some
credence to Barbra's story. In a column on the Sea Shepard web site he claims that the information in the
story came from him in an earlier interview. To lend credence to
something you must first have integrity of which Paul Watson is utterly deficient. Second, Barbra must have
mistaken him for Ben Foley of the Canadian Sealers Association who she said she did interviews with to get
information for the story.
|
| |
|