Press Had Unvoiced Doubts in Boston Slaying : Media: Critics say reporters ignored ‘basic journalism.’ Now, stories are even more sensational.

Almost from the start, journalists here had whispered among themselves that there were holes in Charles Stuart’s bizarre tale of the mysterious black gunman who had murdered his pregnant wife and the son she was carrying.

However, until Stuart’s own brother brought forward startling new evidence implicating Stuart, and Stuart himself apparently committed suicide last week, none of those suspicions made it into their coverage.

Instead, reporters portrayed Charles and Carol Stuart as the ideal couple who had unwittingly blundered into a nightmare of modern urban America.

Despite their doubts, journalists, in their competitive rush, publicly identified several black suspects who had been taken into custody.

As they scramble to untangle the facts in this strange case, which is gripping the nation, Boston’s news media are under scrutiny for the unwitting role they may have had in helping Stuart carry out what apparently was a deadly fraud.

News organizations adept at covering the intricacies of political developments thousands of miles from their readers may have stumbled badly in understanding daily life in their own city.

“I’m mortified personally, and I think all of us should be,” said one reporter who has worked on the story. “We failed to do basic journalism.”

But others say that the media are not to be faulted. “In general, the press in this town reported the story as responsibly as it could under the circumstances,” said Stan Hopkins, news director of WBZ-TV, Boston’s NBC affiliate.

Ironically enough, the reporting since Charles Stuart’s suicide last week has been even more sensational--and, many say, more irresponsible--than before.

The newspapers and airwaves here are filled with unconfirmed reports that Stuart had an extramarital affair, that he was a drug addict, that he took out as much as $1 million in life insurance on his wife.

The paternity of his dead son has been questioned, and one newspaper has claimed that videotapes from a hospital parking garage show Stuart beating his wife only minutes before her death.

Most of these reports have been discredited, and all have been questioned.

“Now, there’s this rush to throw everything out into the open and hope to hit a kernel of truth,” said Mark Jurkowitz, media critic for the Boston Phoenix, a weekly newspaper.

The situation has become so confusing that WBZ plans a prime-time special next week, aimed solely at separating fact from fiction in the case, Hopkins said.

“We are outraged and frustrated to no end,” John Julian, a spokesman for Suffolk County Dist. Atty. Newman Flanagan, said of the reports.

The district attorney “doesn’t understand how they are getting this information” and insists that no one in his office is handing it out, Julian said. Nonetheless, many journalists are blaming their normally reliable sources in law enforcement for giving them bad leads from the start.

Members of Stuart’s family were so distraught over media reports that they had secretly known of Stuart’s role in the murder that they called a press conference Thursday. Two of Stuart’s three brothers had known within days of the shooting of Stuart’s role but had not told the rest of the family until just before Stuart’s apparent suicide, a family attorney said.

The journalistic issues raised by the Stuart case involve more than one sensational murder and apply well beyond one city’s television stations and newspapers.

Too many news organizations, media experts say, ignore the diversity of daily life in the inner city and leave instead the impression that existence there consists solely of drug busts, gang violence and murder.

“The press in all its forms--not just the press in Boston, but the press in Los Angeles and the press in New York--does not accurately and adequately discuss and describe the community to its readers on a regular basis,” said Bill Kovach, curator of Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation.

“A newspaper that will spend a half a million dollars a year to support a correspondent in Moscow won’t spend $20,000 a year to support a correspondent who has a bureau and lives and works in the inner city,” Kovach added. “It is not organized to cover its community, so that, when events like this happen--and they are going to happen--they’re not put in the proper context.”

The Stuart murder happened amid a spate of shootings, heavily covered by local media. Many speculate that Charles Stuart was well aware of this.

The idea of an attack by a stranger--particularly a black man bent on robbery--fit neatly into the perception that many Bostonians already had of their city’s minority neighborhoods. They would overlook the fact that people, particularly women, are far more likely to be murdered by someone they know.

“Most people don’t look at crime statistics, they look at the evening news,” said Ed Diamond, a New York University journalism professor.

But all this analysis is hindsight, and no one can deny that it was a compelling tale that Stuart is now believed to have concocted.

For all the calculation that apparently went into the brutal murder of Carol Stuart last Oct. 23, the killer could not have counted on one stroke of fate--that a crew from the CBS television program “Rescue 911” would happen to be riding around with a Boston ambulance.

CBS News anchorman Dan Rather stunned a national television audience with the videotape of rescuers responding to Stuart’s frantic calls for help from his car phone, even as his wife lay dying beside him on the front seat.

Adding poignancy to the drama was the fact that this attractive couple had been on their way home from a birthing class. Their premature son, delivered by Cesarean section, lived 17 days.

Some pieces of his story did not add up. No one could understand why Stuart had chosen such a circuitous route home or why he was unable to identify major streets that could have helped rescuers to find his car more quickly.

Other questions surfaced as well, but “each of those leads was dismissed as being incredible, because this man was really near death,” Hopkins said.

It is still unclear how Stuart himself was shot in the abdomen, but the seriousness of his wound, which kept him hospitalized for more than a month, made him a convincing victim and witness.

Police began a huge manhunt, relying on Stuart’s description of the assailant and on informants from the racially mixed Mission Hill neighborhood where the crime occurred. The Boston media publicly reported the names of at least two suspects, even though neither was formally charged.

Law enforcement sources, clearly eager to show how far they had progressed in satisfying public demands that the crime be solved, made sure that reporters knew they were developing what appeared to be an almost air-tight case against one suspect, 39-year-old William Bennett. He had a long criminal record, so no one gave much credence to his family’s protests that he was being framed.

The star witness against Bennett was none other than Charles Stuart, who was reported to have had a “strong physical reaction” to viewing a photograph of Bennett. On seeing Bennett in a lineup, Stuart made a “positive identification. It was absolutely crystal clear. That’s the guy,” an investigator told the Boston Globe.

Hours after the fraud was exposed and Bennett was declared innocent of Carol Stuart’s murder, Globe Editor John S. Driscoll issued a statement defending his paper’s coverage as “accurate, thorough, fair and consistent. We reported events as they occurred, and as they were told to us. We relied on official statements and credible sources throughout our coverage.”

Neither the Globe nor the Boston Herald responded to requests for comment Thursday regarding their coverage of the Stuart case.

Relying on official statements was not good enough considering the pressure that investigators were under to produce the murderer, said Ellen Hume, executive director of Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy.

“When we rely on unnamed sources, we have to question why they are giving us this information,” Hume said. “You don’t just take the handout.”

In Thursday’s paper, Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle suggested acidly: “The media did what they do best: Give saturation coverage to an event where everything falls into place, requiring very little work other than a phone call or tape transfer.

“You had a network camera crew on the spot, an amazingly dramatic 911 call and the great white victims. Beginning, middle and end of story.”