The two main issues that bring up intense ethical messages in Shattered Glass are ends-based thinking and the golden rule. Glass violated both of these ethical issues by choosing to value the ends of his elaborate, yet false stories as he valued expediting the story-writing process, and spinning a better story rather than follow the rules set before him.
He went against the golden rule in that he held competing goals against The New Republic. While TNR’s goals were based on telling factual stories, it is clear that Glass was merely trying to tell elaborate tales that may have started with facts, but eventually became totally false.
Glass used ends-based thinking as he merely considered the end product, which were his stories, and broke the golden rule in not considering how others would feel as they were lied to by Glass repeatedly about the stories that he “encountered”. He received well-deserved, and fairly wide-spread criticism, as violated essentially all of the basic tenets of journalism.
He managed to make journalism itself look pretty bad, seemingly violating ethical standards at will. The principles that include actually interviewing people and finding stories about legitimate entities both went out the window in Glass’ mind as he wrote these tall tales.
There are a pair of sources that I looked at which both looked into this issue in further detail. Gal Beckerman published a 2003 review in the Columbia Journalism Review in which he describes how director Billy Ray portrays Glass, and his dramatic rise and fall as a journalist in the movie.
“Although Glass is not glamorized, we do live his wild fantasies with him as if it were reality – we watch him eagerly taking notes at the imagined meeting between the adolescent, pimply hacker, and the software company’s CEO – and the result is a not-so-unsympathetic portrait of a desperate and imaginative striver who fails because he tries too hard to succeed,” Beckerman writes.
I agree with Beckerman’s opinion of how Glass is portrayed in the film. It certainly is a dramatic rise and then fall for Glass, as Ray makes it seem rather Shakespearean at times. Glass is seemingly beloved by his colleagues, who laugh along with his jokes and are incredibly amused by his stories.
Matthew Ehrlich published a 2005 study on the film and the saga itself, titled Shattered Glass, Movies, and the Free Press Myth. In the study, Ehrlich uses Shattered Glass as a case study with regard to how journalists are portrayed in movies. Ehrlich goes more in depth than Beckerman on how the movie itself placed Glass as the focal point for part of the movie, and his editor Chuck Lane as the focus for the latter half.
“The filmmakers shot early scenes inside the magazine offices with a handheld camera but mounted it on a tripod for later scenes in which Lane begins to see through Glass’s lies,” writes Ehrlich.
“The visual image of the magazine thus steadies itself as the film progresses, “the suggestion being that truth as an idea [is] beginning to take hold there, and that order [is] beginning to be restored.”
With this quote, Ehrlich gives a closer insight into how the movie was filmed. The only solutions to prevent journalistic corruption like this in the future is for editors to keep a closer safeguard on their writers. The public also has a role in speaking more outwardly when stories like this have untrue details in them.
I think in 2018, it would be much harder to get away with writing stories to the degree that Glass did. Society has taken great steps forward as far as accountability is concerned, with editors in the modern world constantly fact-checking to make sure they don’t run into situations like this.
Lane went about the situation in the right way, as he made sure to verify the claims of forging against Glass before firing him. He also handled it delicately with his staff, as he knew that he would try not to lose them in the process.
References:
Beckerman, G. (2003). Http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/12597. Columbia Journalism Review, 6(1), 54-55. doi:10.15760/anthos.2014.111
Ehrlich, M. C. (2005). Shattered Glass, Movies, and the Free Press Myth. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 29(2), 103-118. doi:10.1177/0196859904272741