Situation: In this film, “Shattered Glass,” we were able to watch the true story of a troubled journalist, Stephen Glass. Glass was a journalist for The New Republic and was loved by many of his colleagues. His colleagues loved his stories, and always wanted to hear more, just like his audience, but not for one second did they believe he was being unethical with his writing.
Glass was one to love attention, and he especially loved the attention he got from his his co-workers. Glass loved to put on a show when explaining his stories and always wanted to be the most funniest and most creative journalist in the room. Glass being who he is, loving any moment of attention, lead him to fabricate about 27 of his stories in The New Republic.
Glass fabricated his stories in multiple ways. Sometimes it was only quotes or even sources, but there have been times where he has fabricated his entire story from start to finish. Fabricating his stories that way cost him his job, and lost him respect as an ethical journalist.
Analysis: I believe Stephan Glass acted the way he did because of his past. We are not quite sure what happened in past, but we can tell its troubling. He felt the need for constant attention and it led him down an unethical path. You can tell he was under a lot of stress, but he could of followed the ethics of journalism and even talked to his editor about the stress he was under. Glass lying, led him to not being trusted by his co-workers and friends. They never knew when he was telling the truth, just like the boy who cried wolf.
The ethical issues that have taken place in this movie, is the Glass has lied to almost everybody he has worked with, if not everybody. He lost respect and credibility as a journalist for fabricating his stories and having them be published for the public eye. Glass did not just jeopardize his career, he jeopardized the The New Republic itself and the employees there as well.
In the article Stephen Glass: I Lied For Esteem, talks about how he got away with his lying. Every magazine or newspaper has a fact checker, but in this case, at The New Republic, Glass was the fact checker so he knew “how the system worked.” In the article it states how Glass invented everything about his stories and made it work so his stories could go through. Glass said in the interview with 60 Minutes was “For every lie I told in the magazine, there was a series of lies behind that lie that I told– in order to get it to be published.” Glass did not just do one unethical thing. He did not just lie about one story, or a part of a story, he lied about his lies and so on.
In this article, Glass goes into detail about how he lied and the steps he took to fabricate a really good story. He starts off by saying “I would tell a story, and there wold be a fact A, which maybe was true. And then there would be fact B, which was sort of partially true and partially fabricated. And there would be fact C which was more than fabricated and almost not true,” says Glass in the interview with 6o Minutes. In each one of those steps did he state that at least one of his facts are always true, they are all maybe true.
In today’s day in age, if Glass did what he did now, he would of not been able to get away with it like he did in the last 90’s. In the article Newsrooms and Transparency in the Digital Age it talks about how “technological shifts in the landscape have made it impossible to operate in the closed manner typical of the past, journalists are still grappling with the notion of transparency as a professional norm.” Glass got away with a lot back then, but today technology is so advanced that we can look up facts in the article and fact check them ourselves as an audience.
Conclusion: Watching this movie really showed me as a new journalist that it is so very important to be ethical in every part of your writing and to be ethical with your co-workers as well. The movies teaches a lesson to journalist to not sink into the category of what we call “fake news.”
If I were to be Glass’ boss, I would of fired him as well, and would of reacted the same way Chuck did. I do not think that Stephen Glass should every be allowed to re-enter the journalistic field again. The thing that Glass did are unforgivable and and beyond unethical. All Glass had to do was be honest with his co-workers and be honest with himself, because a lot of this could of gone differently if he was just honest in his work.
References: Kroft, S. (2003, May 7). Stephen Glass: I Lied For Esteem. CBS News.Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stephen-glass-i-lied-for-esteem-07-05-2003/
Noer, M. (2014, November 12). Read the original Forbes takedown of Stephen Glass. Forbes Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17512786.2014.924737