Walter Stewart (journalist) - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Born in Toronto, the son of Miller Stewart and Margaret (Peg) Stewart, both atheists, Co-operative Commonwealth Federation activists and writers and CBC Radio broadcasters on nature, he was a class of 1949 graduate of London South Collegiate Institute in London, Ontario. In grade 11, he and a classmate became unpaid high school reporters for the London Echo community newspaper, where they co-wrote "The Lads Who Know," a muckraking column that criticized teaching methods. After the Echo folded, they shifted their attentions to the high school newspaper, alternating as editor-in-chief.

Stewart became an honours student in history at the University of Toronto, but dropped out in 1953 after three years. He took a taxi to the Toronto Telegram, where an editor offered him twenty-nine minutes until deadline to write up a piece on why he'd dropped out. The Telegram took him on as a reporter. He covered police and courts and wrote financial features. His time at the Telegram left him cynical about the news trade: "What I learned about journalism there was that it was a suspect craft, dominated by hypocrisy, exaggeration, and fakery. At the Tely, we toadied to advertisers, eschewed investigative reporting, slanted our stories gleefully to fit the party line (Conservative) and to appeal to the one man who counted – the publisher, John F. Bassett."