Part 1: Situation Definition
The movie Shattered Glass is based on the true story of former journalist Stephen Glass and how he made up over half of his stories while a writer at The New Republic magazine. It was determined that of his 41 articles, 27 contained some sort of fabrication. This includes everything from made up quotes, sources, people, voicemails, and even a fake company website. He seemed obsessed with having people like him, as he was very popular around the workplace, and that his lying became almost something of an addiction to him that he couldn’t control. One of his most famous pieces that exposed him was “Hack Heaven” and ended up being more lies than he could handle.
The biggest issue that arises from the film and his career is how he completely fabricated many of his stories and made up all kinds of different, yet elaborate, parts to them in order to try and cover his tracks. It was truly incredible the lengths that he went to try and ensure that he was never caught, but his fabrication only took so long before it was discovered. One other issue that we see throughout the film is how he also kept lying to people that he worked with. Between colleagues, other writers, and even his boss, the lies never stopped. It was constantly one after the other and seemed like a never ending roller-coaster that eventually crashed ruining not only his credibility, but his professional journalism career.
Part 2: Analysis
The first and main issues from the journalistic career of Stephen Glass is the issue of fabrication. While plagiarism is different and means strictly coping someone else’s work and using it as your own, fabrication means completely making up and falsifying the information. As mentioned above, this includes everything from quotes, to people, to sources, etc.
Glass did this for the self-esteem and sort-of arousal that he would get from making up stories and having people believe him. It was his drug and he was addicted. In an interview on 60 Minutes, he said how he really liked telling people about his upcoming stories and seeing how they would react. Or as Glass put it, he loved the “electricity.” He lived to impress people and make them amazed, even if it all wasn’t true. I think that his mental state could have possibly played a role in this. He stated how we kept wanting to stop, but was just unable to. It’s almost as if his mind was playing a trick on him that he had little to no control over.
The pathological liar that he was, Glass risked and lost everything. Not only was his job at stake, but so was his reputation, his friends, prior bosses, and even his future. Jefferson Spurlock, director of the Hall School of Journalism and Communications at Troy University in Alabama said “Reporters are normally thought of as credible news deliveries. But when some stretch the truth through fabrication or lies, their credibility declines” (Spurlock, 2016). He went on to outline the cases of Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Brian Williams as short case studies to describe their downfall in the journalism world. Spurlock also said that “Sometimes reporters decide to push the envelope a bit and let the world know of events that actually did not happen without informing the public of their fabrications” (Spurlock, 2016). I would say that Glass definitely pushed the envelope, but way more than a bit.
Another big unethical issue that we see from Glass is his constant lying to his colleagues and boss. A big factor in a professional career, especially one with as high of stakes as journalism has, is trust. In fact, I would say that trust is one of the if not the biggest foundation in journalism. Without it, you lose everything as shown by the career of Glass. In “Hack Heaven,” the piece that ultimately outed Glass, his colleagues and boss first trusted him when another company started to look into the story. They all went to bat for him numerous times and he kept betraying them. Even when they asked him if he was making the story up, he kept saying no and everyone in his work place believed him.
More importantly, his readers all trusted him. They would spend time reading his stories and engaging with them only to find out that they aren’t true. Katherine Fink from Pace University said “The single biggest challenge facing journalism today is the public’s lack of trust in it. This is not a new challenge, but it is persistent, and it has been getting worse” (Fink, 2019). She is absolutely right in the sense that a reader cannot believe what a publication is saying if that level of trust is not there. She also stated that “Audiences depend upon journalists to help them make sense of current events by explaining them in context, such as by providing a history of events that led up to the latest news” (Fink, 2019). Imagine that all those events that you read about were fabricated in some way. That is exactly what Glass did and therefore caused him to lose the trust of his readers, colleagues, and boss.
Part 3: Conclusion
I don’t think any kind of solution to what Stephen Glass did exists. It’s tough enough to regain your credibility and come back after fabricating one article, but 27 is way excessive. He ultimately lost everything between his friends, life, career, etc. The lesson to take away from this is never to do what he did. This shows as a prime example that eventually you will get caught. You can go from being at the top of your field one day, to being below the bottom the next. If I was his boss, who was Charles Lane at the time, I would have absolutely fired him. You cannot keep someone on staff who has done what he has time after time. It not only ruins the credibility of the publication, but also the credibility of the boss. One other thing that I would look into is how all of his articles made it through to publication without any red flags on any of them. It seems extremely odd to me that 27 articles made it to print without anyone anywhere questioning something in them.
Part 4: References
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
Fink, K. (2019). The biggest challenge facing journalism: A lack of trust. Journalism, 20(1), 40-43.