Walter Douglas Stewart (April 19, 1931 – September 15, 2004) was an outspoken Canadian writer, editor and journalism educator, a veteran of newspapers and magazines and author of more than twenty books, several of them bestsellers.
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.
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, [sic] John W. H.
From 1968 to 1977, save a one-year interlude at the Star, he worked at Maclean's magazine, posted to Ottawa and Washington and eventually managing editor of the title.
In the 1990s, Stewart wrote a left-wing column for the Toronto Sun until it was retired in a newspaper budget cut, and was a regular guest host on CBC Radio's As It Happens.
He continued writing exposés on issues of public interest with Divide and Con: Canadian Politics at Work (New Press, 1973) and Hard to Swallow: Why Food Prices Keep Rising and What Can Be Done About It (Macmillan of Canada, 1974).
The book was translated into French as Les géants de la finance: un dossier-choc sur l'entreprise bancaire canadienne (tr.
Dismantling the State: Downsizing to Disaster (Stoddart, 1998) critiqued neoconservatism and neoliberalism in Canada, and the haste in many quarters to cut back and privatize public services.
M.J.: The Life and Times of M.J. Coldwell (Stoddart, 2000), commissioned by the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation, was welcomed as a long-overdue biography of the democratic socialist parliamentarian.