Shattered Glass is a poignant movie which brings up very real ethical dilemmas and responsibilities that journalists face in their profession. The first ethical issue is obvious – Stephen Glass passing fictional stories that he spun as fact at The New Republic, a publication that prides itself in providing accurate information to the people who matter. The other ethical issue is how personal relationships could potentially cloud a journalist’s judgement on what is right or wrong.
As a journalist, one’s purpose is to reveal truth. Most journalists think of their profession as noble and one that serve’s the public interest (Foreman, 2016). Furthermore, in today’s increasingly complex social context, many journalists valued their duty to portray the world accurately which calls for them to hold themselves to high standards and provide context behind an event as well as a balanced point of view (Mcintyre, Dahmen, & Abdenour, 2016). Yet, Stephen Glass invented characters, made up quotes and even entire stories to gain fame and self-esteem. Ultimately, over half of his published stories were false or contained false information of some kind. Hence, it is clear that Glass’ actions were completely unethical and went against the primary purpose of the journalistic profession. Additionally, since audiences rely on publications to provide reliable information on an event, he also broke the trust readers have in publications to deliver accurate facts. He failed to meet the basic obligations of a journalist and put journalism as a profession in a bad light.
Moreover, his actions also had implications on his other colleagues. The movie clearly showed how some of his colleagues were reluctant to doubt Stephen Glass at first due to their friendship with him, highlighting the possibility of personal relations clouding one’s judgement in the professional setting. This is understandable since one is unable to live in total isolation from ethical issues in the daily life of their profession setting and one has to carefully consider which personal values they hold when it comes to their personal life conflicting with their profession. However, since journalists’ purpose is to relay the truth and have a social responsibility to their readers to do so, they should journalists should still be required to be held accountable for their own decisions as well as the actions of their peers. Hence, Black and Steele (1991) acknowledge that such dilemmas are difficult to navigate through and hence, suggest the use of the an audit or a checklist that considers many factors such as loyalties, personal values and principles. I think the solution proposed could indeed help many journalists tackle personal dilemmas of when personal ethics come into play of a journalist’s professional decision making.
On a separate note, personally, I found it particularly interesting how Penenberg could quite easily determine that Glass’ article, “Hack Heaven”, was suspicious, yet none of The New Republic’s thousands of readers could do the same. It can be said that with the advent of the Internet, readers too should be more discerning about the information they encounter and perhaps therein lies some responsibility on the journalist to work with audiences to help know which facts to discount and which to believe (Foreman, 2016).
In conclusion, it cannot be denied that it is the primary purpose of journalists to deliver accurate information to their readers. Additionally, journalists would inevitably be faced with ethical dilemmas throughout their careers. Stricter fact-checking, tighter policies on rule-bending as well as comprehensive classes on ethical reasoning could definitely help mitigate the problem. However, I think the solution ultimately lies within the individual and how one chooses to weigh their personal values and that of the specific ethical issue at hand.
References:
Foreman, G. (2016). The ethical journalist: making responsible decisions in the digital age.
Mcintyre, K., Dahmen, N. S., & Abdenour, J. (2016). The contextualist function: US newspaper journalists value social responsibility. Journalism, 19(12), 1657–1675. doi: 10.1177/1464884916683553
Black, J., & Steele, R. (1991). Professional Decision Making and Personal Ethics. The Journalism Educator, 46(3), 3–17. doi: 10.1177/107769589104600301