For those who haven't seen "Shattered Glass": It's a movie based closely on real-life events surrounding New Republic associate editor Stephen Glass in the late '90s. Glass was an exceptionally promising writer in his mid-20s who also sold stories to such publications as George magazine, Harper's and New York Magazine. He had a tremendous knack for, time after time, finding story ideas, situations and people that seemed almost too good to be true.
It turns out they were. Glass was finally busted in May 1998 when some suspicious readers of his piece "Hack Heaven" discovered that none of the sources, people or organizations listed in the article appeared to exist. Further research by The New Republic indicated that 27 of Glass' 41 articles for the magazine were either partially or completely fabricated.
It's a fascinating story and "Shattered Glass" is a gripping film. But how does it fit in with this class?
It wasn't the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Associated Press who discovered Glass' deception. It was Adam Penenberg, who was then working for Forbes' online web publication Forbes.com.
Okay, so Forbes' web publication isn't exactly a blog and Penenberg wasn't exactly a blogger without any training in journalism. In its own way, however, this incident foreshadowed what was to come. In 2003, The Wall Street Journal's Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry pondered the issue, writing:
Forbes's sleuthing showed that online publications could have equal or higher standards of accuracy than established print outlets. Moreover, even though Forbes Digital Tool did the hard work, most people first read about Mr. Glass's firing in the Washington Post, with a credit to Forbes for getting the ball rolling. That's because Forbes Digital Tool--a Web site!--had held off on running the story in an effort to be thorough and fair, and essentially tied the Post after The New Republic issued a press release. In any case, Mr. Penenberg's digging ended one of the biggest journalism frauds of the past 30 years."
Penenberg's reply is equally as interesting. (The blog post is from Nov. 10, 2003 — some scrolling down will be required to find it.) Penenberg writes:
We beat the Washington Post. Pete Danko, in Print Media in Glass Houses (Wired News) got the chronology right: "When the Washington Post ran a story on the fraud in its Monday editions [May 11, 1998], it took superstar media critic Howard Kurtz until the 11th paragraph to credit Forbes Digital Tool, and even then he said merely that The New Republic editor Charles Lane 'began his investigation after receiving inquiries from a reporter for the Web site of Forbes magazine.' As it happened, the online expose was up at midnight Sunday, and it had a lot more juice than the Post's Monday-morning version." (Note: Kurtz wrote a front page story for the Post a few days later in which he fully credited Forbes Digital Tool.)
.....
Hanrahan and Fry lift an old quote of mine from the same Wired story. "I feel strongly that we've been dissed by traditional media so often, maybe this whole incident will show that we deserve some respect."
They disagree. "Trusting or not trusting new media is less of an issue," they counter. "In many cases, the same reporters and columnists write for online and print, with the same voice and standards. Bloggers rip both equally."
But that wasn't the case in 1998--which was, I should point out, when I offered my opinion to Wired. At the time, Internet news was viewed as the ugly stepchild to print, even if the online news organization was tethered--usually tenuously--to a traditional media outlet. Practically no one was writing for both online and print at the same time. Most print reporters didn't want anything to do with the Internet. They thought it was a step down. And you certainly didn't see online reporters moving to print: No one would hire them. That happened later.
It's kind of funny how two different topics — Glass' fabrications and citizen/online journalism — can share common ground like this. I thought Penenberg's views were especially worth sharing with the rest of the class, including his assessment of the way internet news was treated in 1998. It's interesting to see how perception of online journalism has changed in only 10 years.
UPDATE: Just for kicks, here is a link to the story that finally did Glass in:
Hack Heaven
Unfortunately, it's difficult to find too many of Glass' other stories, even online. Apparently many of them were quite entertaining, and they become even more so when one realizes that these articles -- fabrications and all -- made it past fact checkers time and time again. Interestingly enough, several of Glass' earlier stories came under fire from various people and groups, some of whom accused him of dishonest reporting, etc. TNR editors, however, stood behind Glass, who was a rising star at the time.
3 comments:
This is an interesting and relevant connection you have made between the film and the issue at hand in this class. I would like to think that had a taken Ethics one semester later, I would have drawn the same conclusion, but that is a non-issue. This example can be added to a not necessarily long, but prominent list of stories broken by bloggers. Among them, Trent Lott, Monica Lewinski and Dan Rather in regard to the Bush record fiasco.
I think bloggers can catch the mistakes that print medial misses because they have a lot more time to do the fact checking. In print media they have so many stories to check into it would be hard to not make a mistake every now and again. Bloggers can focus their time and effort into one story if they want and do a thorough job in checking all of the sources. That does not excuse the print media for missing what this author did but I think it does show how we do need bloggers to call out people who want to lie to us.
That's a good point, Trent. Some bloggers can really be the armchair quarterbacks of news journalism. I think it may be one reason why so many journalists seem to resent bloggers.
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