Situation Definition
At the core of ethical journalism is instilling in your audience that you can be trusted to uphold the facts and investigate and report thoroughly. Maintaining a credible and trustworthy reputation is essential to a journalist’s ability to thrive and succeed as a reliable vessel of the news.
In the case of Stephen Glass, it took only one mistake for his world to crumble. He had built himself a career based on unethical ways of practicing journalism, and his decisions caught up to him in the most public of ways. There are many issues that can be found with Stephen Glass, but two that I see as incredibly important to understand are his willingness to manipulate colleagues and his commitment to deceiving his audience. These are decisions he had to make every single day, and continue to build upon, until he eventually faced the consequences.
Analysis
So how did Glass get away with it? First, by building a facade of his true personality, and using this to manipulate those he worked with everyday. Glass portrayed himself as someone incredibly insecure in his own endeavors: “Friends and colleagues describe Glass as an extraordinarily affable but insecure person who needs constant affirmation (Dowd p. 15).” Glass wanted others to think he felt as though he was not capable or confident. He knew that someone who does not seem to believe in their own abilities would never seem bold enough to pull off a stunt like his. Yet it was this very insecurity that encouraged him to do so; if he wasn’t good enough to eloquently recite the truth, he would craft an even better, though entirely false, narrative instead.
But it was not just his own coworkers that he tricked. No, in order to be successful in his endeavors, Glass had to deceive his audience as well. After all, it would only take a few tips from close readers for someone to catch onto his antics. But why did it take them so long? Well, because no one assumes that another person is lying. When you read something, hear someone talk, or listen to the radio, your first thought is likely not to question the validity of what they are saying. Unless you have reason to believe that they have spread mistruths in the past and therefore may be again, you probably believe them. And that is because, “as a whole, most people are honest. Only a minority are prolific fabricators (Spurlock p. 74).” Glass took advantage of the idea that more people are trustworthy than not to build even more trust in himself. He capitalized on his audience’s belief that it was much more likely that he was telling the truth than he was to be making everything up.
Conclusion
So we must ask ourselves, in a case such as that of Stephen Glass, what is there to be done? How do we see someone like Glass, a prolific young writer with such potential, turn out to be an utter fraud, and still have faith that other journalists are not just better at hiding their deception? Truly, we can’t. We can’t know for sure that there are not more Stephen Glass’s out their, waiting to trip up just once and be revealed to the world. We can, however, remain vigilant in holding each other accountable. As journalists, we must ask the questions. This is not limited to only the subjects of our stories; we must be just as diligent in demanding answers of one another. Does a detail not seem right about a story? Ask your colleague for clarification before it is sent to publication. Does a source’s quote seem unbelievable? Verify it for yourself, if possible. This is not to say we shouldn’t trust each other; quite the opposite, actually. We should trust that if we all know that others are holding us accountable for our actions, it would be unwise to stray from the ethical path to success.
References
Dowd, A. R. (1998). The Great Pretender. Columbia Journalism Review, 37(2), 14–15. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=800258&site=ehost-live&scope=site
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. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=125698524&site=ehost-live&scope=site