Shattered Glass: read between the lies of investigative journalism (part 1)

Theatrical poster

It is known that when filmmakers want to reflect journalism, they usually transform journalists into some kind of heroic action characters. For instance in a movie The Insider we can see a reporter who demolishes extremely bad conspiracy or in All the President's Men two enthusiastic journalists made a corrupt president to be compulsorily retired. Not in a few movies journalists are depicted as life-savers. In this regard, Shattered Glass is a unique movie which describes the story of a journalist on a far more human scale (it is also seen on a trailer). The film is based on real events and it develops the world of pressured national political journalism. 

 The real life of Stephen Glass, a writer for The New Republic, who in 1998 began modifying facts to fiction in his journalism, is dramatized in Shattered Glass (American drama film written and directed by Billy Ray in 2003). Today’s journalists said that on the second Friday in May in the hall of the Hyatt hotel in the Maryland suburb of Bethesda, near Washington, nothing less than the most sustained fraud in the history of modern journalism was disclosed.

Hayden Christensen (played the role of S. Glass)

Stephen Glass. F/Stop Studio

Being at 25, Stephen Glass was the most desirable young journalist in the USA’s capital.

When working at The New Republic or Rolling Stones, he writes stunning investigative articles about various people and he was the example for many great journalists. But there was a problem: he creates things and even whole stories with the intention to produce colorful, original and attention-grabbing articles. He wanted to present something more provocative, than entirely truth could offer. Stephen Glass created fake voice mails from artificial sources, fake phone numbers, faxes, letterheads, memos; he published fake typed notes from imaginary events, written with intentional misspellings, fake handwritten notes, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings which never happened and so on. According to American journalist B. Bissinger (2007), each of Glass’s articles was the “act of manipulative, aggressive trickery, as a grander and more precariously improvised adventure of the mind”.

But where goes away journalistic everyday ritual of source and facts checking? Many of Stephen Glass’s stories had been questioned, so why these fictions satisfied The New Republic’s strict fact-checking department?