“Shattered Glass” is a film that shows the dramatic fall from fame of Stephen Glass, a reporter who had been building himself mountains to stand on on his path to success. Those mountains were, unfortunately, literally being built by Glass, because of the 41 articles he wrote for The New Republic in the two years he worked there, 65% of them were partly or completely fabricated. Such a dramatic and well-hidden lie astounds people, and they wonder how he did it, and why.
The two most glaring ethical messages to me were, obviously, his consistent and sometimes repetitive lying, as well as how he came to the point where he was making up complete stories without being caught.
In an interview with CBS (2003) shared with us in class, Glass says for his reason to perpetually lie; “I loved the electricity of people liking my stories. I loved going to story conference meetings and telling people what my story was going to be, and seeing the room excited. I wanted every story to be a home run.” To any normal person, this seems like an impossible to believe reason to risk your life and career, but to a liar, the desire to get that “electricity” would overpower the risk. While writing for The New Republic was Glass’ main job, he also wrote pieces for magazines like Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and George, which earned him a lot of money for each article. Glass was wanted for his work, and he knew that, and he relished in that feeling, therefore continuing to fabricate stories and spinning himself deeper into his web of lies. This led to one of Glass’ catchphrases in the movie, when he would receive a call from another magazine, to have a coworker ask “When did you start writing for them?” and for Glass to respond ”Oh it’s probably nothing. Just send it to my voicemail,” which would warrant skeptical looks from the coworkers but no further questions.
This, along with his other movie catchphrase “Are you mad at me?” any time he’s brought in to speak about his work, creates a character who is clearly guilty and trying to hide that fact, which begs the question of how he got away with this for so long without anyone asking more questions.
In the 2003 CBS interview, Glass also says that he began to fabricate in a simple way, which was when he was writing an article on Washington Legislation, where he just wanted one perfect quote, and when he put his desired quote into the article, he didn’t take it out, beginning the whirlwind of lies ingrained in over half of Glass’ articles. Spurlock (2016) says that “Self-esteem and social acceptance are two factors [of lying]” which are both factors of why Glass continued his string of fabrications. He wanted to be accepted as an amazing journalists with larger than life stories to make himself feel better. In the article Why They Lie: Probing the Explanations for Journalistic Cheating, Shapiro (2006) says that in Glass’ book; The Fabulist, the character in the book, who is an obvious replica of Glass, claims he was under pressure from superiors to create interesting pieces and that it wasn’t important to have it be factual, but that this kind of pressure in nonexistent in the real world.
It is still astounding that Glass was able to completely fabricate stories without being caught, but he knew the system so well that he was able to write his way around getting caught. As said in the article by Spurlock (2016), most people, especially journalists, are not pathological liars, and there are only a few who behave this way. Because of this you cannot force an entire fact checking team to be on the lookout for these kinds of liars in their most charismatic or decorated journalists because of a few bad eggs, but there should be at least one or two people on the lookout for suspicious behavior like the kind that Glass portrayed.
References:
Leung, R. (2003, August 15). Stephen Glass: I Lied For Esteem. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stephen-glass-i-lied-for-esteem-07-05-2003/
Shapiro, I. (2006). Why They Lie: Probing the Explanations for Journalistic Cheating. Canadian Journal Of Communication, 31(1), 261-266.
SPURLOCK, J. (2016). WHY JOURNALISTS LIE: THE TROUBLESOME TIMES FOR JANET COOKE, STEPHEN GLASS, JAYSON BLAIR, AND BRIAN WILLIAMS. ETC: A Review Of General Semantics, 73(1), 71-76.