Situation Definition
The movie “Shattered Glass” tells the story of Stephen Glass. Glass was an accomplished reporter for The New Republic magazine and seemed to be on the rise as a star reporter. His stories were larger than life, fascinating tales that hooked readers. Other writers would wonder how he would beat them to the punch to these amazing pieces. Well, it turned out that these stories were larger than life because most were made up by Glass.
Steven Glass is not a plagiarizer which is one of my biggest ethical issues. What he did was fabrication. He made up stories and he went to such great lengths to protect that they were fabricated. Both Fabrication and plagiarism are terrible for different reasons.
Analysis
Plagiarism is a major issue because someone is taking credit for another person’s work. I honestly cannot think of anything more unethical than that. It destroys credibility in a journalist’s work completely in my eyes. The worst part is sometimes the journalist just makes a really bad choice.
In the profession of journalism accuracy and producing news quickly are the two most important things. According to an article called “In Journalism We Distrust” written by Harry Lou the people of America are more distrusting of Journalism than ever. Plagiarism is one of the main causes as it violates the ethical principle of trust. How can people trust a journalist who steals information?
Now fabrication is just as bad and there is probably a no more famous example of fabrication then Steven Glass. During his time at The New Republic Glass fabricated pieces of information in at least 27 of the 41 articles he wrote. Glass most likely did this because he was a brilliant man who was a great writer. However, he was also someone who wanted to be very successful very quickly.
In the scholarly article “ Troubling Times In Journalism” author Bill Kirtz looks at not just Glass’s case but of a writer from the Boston Globe who had been proven to have fabricated information in some of their stories. Patricia Smith was a Pulitzer finalist writer for The Boston Globe and even though her Pulitzer nominated pieces had no evidence of fabrication they still had to be withdrawn. Fabrication once again breaks the ethical principle of trust which I believe to be the most important matter of ethics every journalist must follow.
When this trust is violated readers no longer trust journalism. It becomes an all too easy argument for people to use the despised term “fake news”. We must avoid plagiarism and fabrication at all costs as they destroy trust. Without trust, there is no journalism and we as journalists have failed in our duty to the public.
Conclusion
Fabrication is much easier to fix as some simple fact-checking can find multiple errors. Like in the movie where they went to the building that held the “hacker convention” by asking the man at the reception the editor found out that no events were held on Sundays. Fact-checkers must be willing to do the diligence for things like that. As the saying goes “if it’s too good to be true then it probably is”.
Now plagiarism is a little bit more complicated. Due to the recent changes in journalism and with the advent of social media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle the pressure on journalists is much greater than before. The pressure to be the first one to have the story can cause a journalist to plagiarize another’s work. While I have sympathy for the good journalists who make this mistake they would still have to be fired. One possible solution is to have less strict deadlines but in today’s world, I think that just isn’t possible.
References
Kirtz, B. (1998, July). Troubling Times In Journalism. Retrieved February 12, 2020, from https://www.quillmag.com/
Lou, H. (2019). In Journalism We Distrust. Quill, 107(4), 8–16.