The movie Shattered Glass serves to detail a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when a news reporter chooses to violate his ethical obligations both to his readers, and to his colleagues. The movie, in a narrative rather than documentary style, follows the true story of the career-tarnishing misadventures of a promising young reporter named Stephen Glass. The young man, overwhelmed between his workload with his paper the New Republic, studying law, and teaching college courses in his spare time, gives into the temptation of fabricating and flat out inventing stories for the sake of convenience and efficiency.
Due to Stephen’s engaging fabricated stories he finds unusual success in a short amount of time. This somewhat arouses the suspicions of his colleagues and competing journalists, but most of the details are well-covered enough that he can get away with it. Stephen’s ultimate downfall is the careful eye of his editor. Every now and then his editor would catch small details about Stephen’s stories that didn’t add up, arousing suspicion.
Eventually his career fueled by deception would completely collapse around him. When he creates a compelling story about a computer hacker being paid off by a large corporation, he accidentally oversteps his bounds with a fellow colleague. The colleague decides to investigate the story and easily finds numerous holes in the facts. This ultimately leads to the involvement of Stephen’s editor who easily pieces together that the entire story was a lie from the ground up.
The aftermath leaves Stephen suspended with a tarnished and disgraced reputation in the news industry. What was once such a promising young career was now a dead end. The big takeaway from the tale of Steve Glass for me was that the short term relief of lying to one’s readers and colleagues is so completely meaningless when compared to the potential career disaster of being caught in a lie or fabrication. Even ignoring the ethical and moral issues with professional dishonesty, it is a poor decision purely on a risk/reward examination.
The fact that Glass went so overboard with the fabrications but still happened to be moderately successful for a while really makes you wonder whether or not this happens under the radar to a smaller extent in the news industry today. I have to believe that there is a more strict monitoring process by overseeing editors, but ultimately a paper has to trust its journalists to some extent. If they went around trying to corroborate every little detail of every story it would be impossible to get anything done. Fake news has been a hot topic of late for both genuine and (ironically) fabricated reasons, but I personally feel that it’d be foolish to assume that things like this no longer happen on a somewhat common bases, with journalists getting away with it. Although in the modern industry compilations like the AP utilizing internet databases make for much more efficient and convenient information collection, perhaps the expedition of the journalistic process has led the industry to the point where fabrications such as the Glass incident are not seen as worth the effort.