"Journalism is about Pursuing the Truth"

Megan Ruetsch
mr285105@ohio.edu

Shattered Glass is a movie based on the journalistic career of Stephen Glass, who was a charismatic journalist at The New Republic in the 1990s. Glass was known for creating brilliant stories that always seemed a little too good to be true, and in fact many of them were not.

Glass was finally caught in his own web of lies when a reporter for Forbes Digital Tool decided to do a little fact checking of his own on the story that Glass wrote about computer hackers. He quickly determined that the piece was in fact entirely made up when he couldn't find a single bit of truth in the piece. After he confronted The New Republic, Glass continued to spin his web of lies until he couldn't find a way out of them.

Eventually The New Republic determined that Glass had made up 27 of the 41 articles he wrote for the magazine.

This story managed to capture one of the biggest holes in journalism: fact checking. The copy staff uses the notes of the reporter in order to verify that the story is true, however, what if the notes are doctored, as was the case of Glass? He managed to make up his notes so that when the story was fact checked against them, the story seemed to be true. Fact checkers need to use other resources so that this doesn't happen, use the notes as a starting place and then work out from there in order to make sure that the story is in fact true.

Another way that this problem could have been averted in The New Republic would have been to use photos. The magazine didn't print photos, if they had then it would have been harder for Glass to make up people because he would need faces to photograph in addition to his made-up quotes.

The moral that we as journalists can learn from this story and movie is that journalism is all about pursuing the truth. Make sure that your notes are indeed facts and that when adding color to the story, make sure that you are staying true to what actually happened.

*movie poster photo courtesy of impawards.com
*photo of Stephen Glass courtesy of theage.com.au