Situation Definition

The movie “Shattered Glass” made me more aware of the ethical responsibility journalists are held to and how much of an impact a journalist can actually have based on their work. Being an ethical journalist is not a suggestion, it’s more of a requirement in order to be legit in the so called big leagues.

In the movie “Shattered Glass” Stephen Glass wasn’t a good journalist. To start off he fabricated numerous news stories by making up fake quotes, fake interviews and fake websites. His famous fabricated story was with the mini bar in the hotel room after the political party. Later on he went on to write more stories with false lies and misleading readers. He lied to his co-workers the whole time, establishing a true relationship with them just to go behind their backs. It came down to the pressure of Forbes that kept questioning his sources for the hacking event. It was found that Stephen lied about every source and event that actually took place, or in this case didn’t take place.

Analysis

I think what Stephen Glass did was terrible and should never be able to be a journalist again. The first detail about this whole situation is that he lied to his co-workers and boss. A trust is supposed to be set among the people you work with so that when shit hits the fan, they have your back as long as they know the truth. Stephen even lied to his editor, the last person you would lie to because they are the ones who could help you.

The first scholarly article I used about trust was “The biggest challenge facing journalism: A lack of trust.” In this article it describes the lack of trust that the general public has over the media and journalists.

“Having the trust of one’s audience is vital to journalism’s core function of ‘sensemaking’ (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2014). 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” (Katherine Fink).

Stephen Glass not only lied to his co-workers, he lied to all the readers. He provided false claims and quotes that told a story that he wanted to portray instead of actual fact telling to his readers. Instead, they were given fiction.

The next scholarly article I came across was “The Art of lying” by Victor H. Matthews. Here in a portion he goes on to describe “social interaction, even in the most casual of encounters, involves judgment or mental profiling. The mental trigger in these encounters that leads to the fabrication of a lie may be based on any of these: simple protective coloration when meeting a stranger for the first time; a face-preserving public cloak when encountering an opponent or an enemy or the desire for personal amusement based on the ability to outwit or to out maneuver others”(Matthews).

We later found out that Stephen Glass fabricated his stories to give a more intense story that would draw the intention of many more readers. It’s if he seemed that the material he was providing wasn’t enough.

Conclusion

Normally people deserve second chances, but Stephen Glass does not. What he did is what gives journalists a hard time to be credible. What he did is not right but I will give it to him that it was very creative of him to do what he did.

Refrences

New 2FA prompt now live on WebAccess. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://journals-sagepub-com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/doi/epub/10.1177/0146107917697902

New 2FA prompt now live on WebAccess. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://journals-sagepub-com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/doi/10.1177/0146107917697902