Stephen Glass has pulled off unethical moves during his time as a journalist for The New Republic. These choices that he made affected his career as a journalist. Glass fabricated multiple stories during his time with The New Republic which resulted in him in losing his job and will most likely not able to be a journalist for the rest of his life.
These moves hurt his overall image and also affect many people around him. His choices would forever put a burden on him and others around him like family. He broke two major principles in fabricating stories and selective misquoting of individuals.
When Glass was working for The New Republic, he was in the process of studying for his law degree. During this time he was very stressed out over work and studying. While he was stressed out, he decided to fabricate stories and quotes to save time.
These two unethical choices he made would have dire consequences. By blatantly telling lies about people being at made up places and putting people’s words in their mouth. These choices were against many of the journalistic principles that many journalists learn during their first years in college.
The main principle that every journalist should follow its truth-telling. One lie will affect any journalist career with a snap of a finger. Also, morality was another principle broken since he did not account for what he was doing as in it being wrong or not. He enjoyed that people were liking his stories and did not take into the account of what the consequences were. In an away, he did have a reckless disregard for the truth.
This case is quite similar to the Jayson Blair case. Jayson Blair lied about going to certain places even though he was never there. He also went and used other peoples work to make up his stories. Ivor Shapiro labeled Blair and Glass as serial fabricators that distinguish from others in the hall of shame (Shapiro, I. (2006)). Blair went on to plagiarize 39 stories for the New York Times (Shapiro.I.(2006)).
Another journalist was also very similar to Glass and Blair when it came to unethical practices. Janet Cooke is another example of a journalist fabricating stories for the sake of fame and glory. Cooke fabricated a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict in the D.C. area, the story itself went on to win a Pulitzer Prize (SPURLOCK, J. (2016)). The story was eventually discovered as fake, and her prize was taken away from her. This is very similar to Glass in a way that they both fell in love with the fame and glory.
Overall if I were ever faced with a situation that I did not have a lot of time to finish a story, I would always ask for more time. Fabricating a story is unacceptable in this industry. It is better to be as truthful as possible and able to take responsibility for your actions.
Sure there are consequences, but one has to make some sort of sacrifice to do something right. If I wanted to pursue a different job or degree, I would simply put the focus on that task. By doing an unethical practice like fabrication should not be done by any future journalist.
References:
Shapiro, I. (2006). Why They Lie: Probing the Explanations for Journalistic Cheating. Canadian Journal of Communication, 31(1), 261–266. Retrieved from http://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=20591083&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://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=125698524&site=ehost-live&scope=site