Stephen Glass committed many unethical acts in his time with the New Republic. While it is up to the individual which act they think was the worst, I believe to acts stick out more than the others. The two main acts that are the most unethical to me is that he lied in most of his stories and the steps he went to cover up these lies.
Stephen Glass did not only lie in one piece of his, he lied in almost every one of the articles he created. Once it was found out he was lying about his hackers piece, they then went back and realized that most of his pieces has also been fabricated. While not all fully made up, it ruined his credibility and the credibility of the magazine.
The other unethical act he committed was the lengths he went to in order to cover up these lies. The problem with this is that he had the people he worked with swearing by his work and when he was discovered to be a fraud, those people had a lot of egg on their faces. It was unethical because it started to affect many more people then just himself.
Stephen Glass fabricated at least 27 of his 41 stories during his time at the New Republic. To this day, he is still retracting some of the pieces that he wrote back then. This issue raises many questions. Mostly, it raises questions towards the magazine he work for. People trust that any magazine story they read is based off of credible evidence and they can believe their source. In this case, The New Republic reported mostly on high ranking political issues in Washington D.C. How can anyone trust a magazine that would allow these false stories to get through their fact checking system?
Furthermore, Stephen Glass knew from his first lie that these stories were fabricated. This raises many ethical questions about the man himself and why he continued to lie. In an article written by Jefferson Spurlock, he examined the use of lying in media and why these people lie in the first place. He compared Stephen Glass to other liars in journalism history such as Jayson Blair, Brian Williams, and Janet Cooke. His conclusion in most of these cases was that the lying was done to beef up a story that was not very interesting to begin with. (Spurlock)
The second major ethical violation that Stephen Glass committed was the cover up process he went through to make sure his lies stayed hidden. Not only did these attempts fool his co-workers and damage their credibility, it damages the reputation and credibility of a lot of news media outlets. When the story broke about how Stephen Glass was able to fabricate these stories easily by creating websites and fake answering machines, it damaged the credibility of any news stories that rely on such sources.
Reading an article based around the core ideas of ethics according to the New York Times, it talks about how an essential idea is having media as a whole be credible. “Journalists’ pressures must be balanced with ethical and legal principles to create a more credible media.” (Conley) This idea is exactly the reason why this act was so unethical. It undermines the credibility of media as a whole.
If I were in the shoes of Stephen Glass, I would not be able to keep up the lies the way he did. The pressure of the lies and the amount of stress I know it would cause the rest of the people involved would be to great for me to bare. I would have not lied in the first place, but I would have not tried to do it more than once or tried to cover it up the way he did.
Stephen Glass broke many ethical codes with his actions during his time at the New Republic. Not only did he lie and make up stories, but he went to extreme lengths to cover up those lies and doing this made a lot of his colleagues look very stupid. He undermined the credibility of the very outlet that gave him a chance to write stories.
He also made it harder for people to trust media in general. It is up to journalists to maintain the credibility of the media and Stephen Glass did not do his part in this. He is still talked about to this day and people may still not trust media outlets because of the mistakes and lies that he told.
The lessons learned here is that it is up to the journalists themselves to maintain the credibility of the media as a whole. If it were me, I would have come clean when I was caught. I would not have tried to cover it up and dig a deeper hole for myself. I also would have shown a lot more remorse then Stephen Glass did. He has since came off as not genuine at all in his apologies and has only seemed to be interested in forwarding his own image and books.
References
Conley, D. (2009). Media Law and Ethics: Intersection of The New York Times Code of Ethics and Cases. Conference Papers – – National Communication Association,1-36. Retrieved February 11, 2018.
Spurlock, J. (2016). WHY JOURNALISTS LIE: THE TROUBLESOME TIMES FOR JANET COOKE, STEPHEN GLASS, JAYSON BLAIR, AND BRIAN WILLIAMS. A Review of General Semantics,73(1), 71 -76. Retrieved February 11, 2018.