Who or what was to blame for Stephen Glass' deceptions making it into print? Was there any way to prevent what happened? Do you think another episode like it could occur? Why?
Please respond by 6 p.m., Sunday.
Also please follow the link below and read the column, provided courtesy of Brandon, for our discussion Monday:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=191777
Teaching Notes
You must become the flame on the candle. - Thich Nhat Hanh
Thursday, September 30, 2010
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Is Media Ethics Education DOA?
It sounds like a joke Jay Leno would tell during his opening monologue on The Tonight Show. Hear about the graduate students at the prestigious journalism school? They got caught cheating on an ethics exam. Ha ha ha. Except that’s actually what happened at Columbia University
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
A Question for Socrates
The question of how ethics is learned, or even if it can be, is as old as Western philosophy. In Plato’s dialog Meno the title character asks, “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?” Of course, Socrates, being Socrates, resists giving a definite answer. But we can’t. The sad fact is, students had better get an effective ethics education now or they may never.
Last summer I conducted an ethics workshop for some reporters and editors at the Poughkeepsie Journal, a small daily in upstate
But what I remember most is the air of defeat that clung to the staff as we sat on hard plastic chairs in the break room discussing the cases. I could hear in their voices the bitterness and cynicism of employees forced to follow corporate policies they despised. Recently, for example, the paper had started running display ads on the front page and section fronts, a much more grievous ethical lapse, their mumbled asides suggested, than anything the case studies might have to offer.
I don’t want my students to ever wear the gray, defeated expression I saw that day on the faces at the Journal. But given the downward direction in which the media are moving, and fast, how in the world can I prevent it from happening?
Teaching Media Ethics by Telling Stories
A friend of mine who teaches at a big Midwestern university recounts in class the events of her first week as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune. She was sent to Duluth to cover Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey on the campaign trail. When they were introduced, Humphrey vigorously shook her hand. “Oh yes, Susan,” he said, “I read your stuff all the time.” He couldn’t have read her stuff, though; she hadn’t written anything yet. “Just a few words,” she explains to her students, “but words that taught this fledging reporter a great lesson about pols and the little lies they tell.”
I usually find occasion during the semester to quote I. F. Stone’s dictum, “Every government is run by liars and thieves, and nothing they say should be believed,” to make the same point. But Susan’s story makes the point better. That’s because it has existential force. Her story vividly captures in a way a secondhand quote can’t the realities of a reporter’s life.
Some might think telling “war stories” is a waste of precious class time. I’ve a colleague who didn’t want to fall into the “trap” of regaling students with stories ad nauseam (“which, let’s face it, is easier than teaching or grading,” he said). So one semester he kept track. When he toted it all up at the end, he was surprised that he’d used less than an hour - out of 45 – talking about his newspaper experiences. And yet, he admitted, it was his stories that students seemed to remember most.
“Stories teach us how to live,” Daniel Taylor said in his essay, “The Ethical Implications of Storytelling.” What he meant was that stories preserve our experience for contemplation and evaluation. Although not all stories carry a heavy message, there’s an entire category of stories, so-called “exemplary tales,” that are told to convey a moral.
Our war stories are potentially just such tales. They can provide evidence, in ethicist John Barton’s words, of “how real human beings live through various crises and trials and remain human.” My colleague who kept tabs on his storytelling has described his stories as cautionary. Most, he said, deal with “screwups I learned from.”
But sometimes the storyteller and the audience can’t agree on what exactly the moral of a story is.
When Susan was a cub reporter on the Tribune, she interviewed the Beatles, who were on their second tour of the States. She got into their hotel room by dressing up as a waitress in an ugly, mustard-colored uniform and accompanying an actual room service waiter upstairs. Ringo took one look at her little plastic name tag – it read “Donna Brown” – and snorted, “What kind of name is that?” The waiter nudged her in the side. “Tell them what you real name is,” he urged. She did, as well as her reason for being there. Rather than throw her out, the Beatles politely answered her questions. They even let her phone for a photographer. The next day her story ran on the front page, with a photo of John sitting at a table and looking up at her and laughing as she poured coffee in his cup. She still has a glossy print of that photo somewhere.
Many of Susan’s students think she’s nuts for not having the photo hanging up in her office. They also think she’s nuts for saying she’d never participate in the same kind of stunt today. To her celebrity-struck students, disguising herself as a hotel waitress to get an interview with the Beatles seems soooo cool. They lose all sight of the fact that it wasn’t a story of vital public interest that demanded undercover methods.
Susan intends one lesson when she talks about her hard day’s night, but her students, living in a paparazzi-saturated culture, draw another. “It may be a lost cause,” she remarked to me.
Or maybe not. Negotiations over what the point of a story is can be part of the point of the story. In the process of negotiating, we test different interpretations, try out different themes. This is helpful. This is educational. Lawrence Kohlberg, the Harvard psychologist famous for his research on the stages of moral development, contended that “the teaching of virtue is the asking of questions. . . not the giving of answers.” Stories don’t necessarily have to yield clear moral rules to be of value. It’s enough sometimes if they just give us something to think about.
15 comments:
I believe that what allowed Stephen Glass to fabricate stories that were accepted and published is the systematic process of journalism that is practiced today. As we discussed in class, everything in media is attached to a deadline. Journalists are pressured to write stories with a little amount of time because of the fear that someone else will one up them. This gives journalists barely anytime to verify their sources and in some cases allows them to fabricate information. In a sense, it is bad journalists who coerce other journalists into abandoning their ethical standards for the sake of getting the story to print before or at the same time as the competition. So much emphasis is placed on time because the publications that get the story out first are the ones that get paid. Not to mention the stories that have the most scandal or are most entertaining are the ones that are going to be read. Ultimately newspapers are businesses and in our money economy the dollar rises over any code of ethics. There is no room for ethics when the main focus of journalism is to sell.
If the people at The New Republic were more careful in investigating the warning signs that pointed out Glass's inaccuracies, if they were not so caught up in how much attention his stories brought to the magazine, then yes I think what happened could have been prevented. I do feel that the staff at The New Republic was definitely duped by Glass's schemes, but who wants to probe when the stories prove to be effective. With the attention/money economy we live in today I can see history repeating itself. We saw it in the e-mail case study we did in class when none of Michele's sources could be verified, which proved that all of the articles she wrote were filled with lies. If the journalists of our day are polluted by the thought that what they do is just business, then the importance of truth and ethical practices are going to disappear.
I think anyone else except Stephen Glass is to ‘blame’ for his deceptions making it into print but I do think that others are responsible. The fact checkers at The New Republic should have scoured a little deeper to double-check his sources and since Glass has a reputation for bizarre stories, the editors should have questioned the truth in his stories. While editors should trust in their writers, they have the responsibility of making sure all the stories that are published are true and accurate.
This incident could have been prevented if the fact checkers checked Glass’ sources and the editors did a little more supervision. However, even with the tightest enforcement of procedures and protocols, we can’t possible control everything – people always slip through the cracks and shit does happen.
Glass’ career at The New Republic lasted from 1995 – 1998 and I would think that the profession has grown since then but that is not the case. From the example we discussed in class about a graduate of New Paltz’s journalism program who exposed her co-worker for fabricating stories, we can see that deceitful in the industry is still a reality. Society encourages us to take shortcuts and does not teach us consequences for bad actions - because of this, I believe episodes like this are bound to occur again.
It seems easy to place the blame the ones who didn't double check on the sources that Glass provided, but we all make mistakes and happen to slip up on a regular basis. I'm not saying that what they did was okay by any standards, but Glass himself is the actual one to blame. He knew what he was doing when he used deceit to fabricate his stories to ruin his own and the New Republic's reputations. I don't think there was any way to prevent what happened because no matter how essential the code of ethics in journalism, there will always be potential rule breakers. If there was a more elaborate method of fact checking, then it's possible that another blowup won't occur. But the chances are that something like this is prone to happen again.
You can't blame deadlines for Stephen Glass's conduct. He's what I would consider a compulsive liar. He’s at fault for his deceptions making it to print. You don’t blame the car who’s airbags didn’t deploy for killing someone, you blame the drunk driver. It’s the first action, the origin of a problem or accident that’s to blame, not the backups, not the fact checkers. Backups and fact checkers wouldn’t be needed if the first line, the people that should be held to the highest of ethical standards did their job the way they swore they would when they took the role as journalist. Simply put the person most at fault here is Stephen. Not only does he fail as journalist, he fails and lacks character and I wouldn’t trust him with anything and wouldn’t want him as a friend.
The way I see it is if you fail professionally, you fail everything. That’s where your supposed to be the most honorable and upright, and if you fail at that, you must fail the friendship outside of work role as well. I think all journalist should be give an ethical test before they’re hired. They’re given out for entry-level hourly jobs at Wal-Mart; why not with something like journalism. I’d like to hope that an episode of countless false articles making it to print would never happen again with hopes that there are better fact checkers than that, but a few false articles here and there unfortunately will always happen. We’re only human and therefore will always make an occasional mistake. One article with a false fact by mistake may be excused with good enough reason, and reprimand. But what Stephen Glass did was a complete let down to the entire Journalism Industry.
I think the problem is, and the reason why this really could happen again at really any time, is because the majority of people in todays society aren't completing all their responsibilities, they're just using shortcuts to get all their tasks done as soon as possible. If editors & supervisors really took all the appropriate steps that they were supposed to they would know almost immediately that the sources didnt exist and that there was no way to confirm his stories. It's like the discussion we had in class, people are more concerned nowadays with getting things done, instead of getting everything done correctly & efficiently. Any time you have an editor who isn't doing 100% of his fact checking & work leaves room for a writer to come in with a story and exploit the situation. I think it was the lazy editors fault.
I think there are a lot of people to blame in the Stephen Glass case. It is standard practice in journalism to recheck sources and facts about any story. To me, bells were going off in my head as soon as I saw he wrote so many ‘too good to be true’ stories in such a short amount of time. It’s a mystery to me as to why the fact checkers and Glass’ editors did not become suspicious of his stories or even triple check his sources. Above all else, I also have to blame the field of Journalism as it is today. Journalism has lost it’s motivation to find truth and replaced it with money and competition.
I don’t like to speculate because you never really know how things could have been. I’m not entirely sure that this incident could have been prevented. It is possible that maybe if his professors in college noticed his writing technique or personality that they could of maybe steered him in the right direction, but it is not up to professors to do that. All they can do is give what they have in terms of guidance and it is the student’s choice whether or not they take it to heart. So who else could have prevented this? I think the fact checkers failed to do their job. I understand that Glass did go to great lengths to cover up his tracks, but it is the job of the fact checker to go through every story. And why weren’t they suspicious in the first place? A young guy who just recently graduated all of a sudden has stories galore with sources to prove them, in an idealistic world that sounds great, but this is reality! I think they were enthralled with the idea of getting so much publicity and failed to do their jobs because of it. However, it is understandable that this guy leaked through the system. We are humans not robots and we make mistakes. I do feel very much so that Glass had everyone fooled, and as humans, we tend to see the best in people.
I think in life every mistake should be a lesson learned, and I’m not convinced that Journalism has learned much at all from this case or others. Although this case did happen over a decade ago, Journalism has grown in many ways, but in a lot it hasn’t. The media has become this factory of stories. Whatever it takes to get the story, is the common overarching theme in Journalism today. Competition, money, deadlines, they all factor in to why this could happen again. I think because of the internet and the idea of 24 hour journalism, the field has grown to be a bit more protective. However, it also depends on the people doing the jobs of reporting, fact checking, and editing. If they fail to do their jobs, they are also failing Journalism, and most importantly, the public.
I’ve seen the film and in CBS article, he says he did it for esteem. Of course both Glass and the New Republic are to blame for his work making it to print but so are those who praised him years before he landed that job. I definitely agree with Jackie that many people are to blame for Glass’ ongoing and destructive deception. He was a teacher’s pet and an editor of his college newspaper, which most likely dissuaded future employers like the New Republic when you have a candidate that writes well and has good references. He wasn’t just a writer. He went from being a fact-checker to the associate editor with only one enemy throughout his five years at TNR. To prevent this, I think he should have been more probed and the elder employees should have listened to Lane instead of playing favorites. He should have stopped lying! His stories went to Slate, Rolling Stone and Harper’s. It was his fault for the madness and the rest who were duped should have chosen the truth over sensation. In the end, somebody still needs him and will take him. It’s a little disturbing that he was still rewarded thousands of dollars to publish a book about his lies.
Besides your comment in class about publications constantly laying off journalists and editors, I have read elsewhere that this is going to be a huge problem for anyone that puts their trust in the media. The lack of good reporters and good editors, along with adequate fact-checkers will create another Stephen Glass. Perhaps all journalists will be lumped into the Glass category. There’s already too much distrust for the media for these Glass prototypes to slip through. Plus, things in stories are already fabricated with an Editor’s note at the bottom. Oops, we spelled your last name wrong. Someone needs to save journalism, and with the Internet slowly taking over the media, there won’t be time/space for efficient fact-checking and credible journalists.
Like the story that Emily told in class about a friend of her's who wanted to publish an unfinished and inaccurate piece for a deadline, Glass is to be blamed, initially. Although we can, yes, say he may have been nervous due to deadlines and thus fabricated in order to make it on time...how is that accurate journalism? What he should have done was to ask for a longer amount of time, or maybe even realized that if he couldn't finish his work without fabricating, that journalism was not the correct profession for him.
However, it doesn't stop there. Although he was at fault initially, we must then look at those who put it to print: copy editors, page editors, editor-in-chief, etc. It is the copy editor's job to fact check thoroughly and accurately and find the slip-ups that any faulty journalist is making [either on purpose or by accident]. The fact that it went to print after all of the fabrications put forth in each article, well, it is necessary to blame all of those people as well. Clearly mistakes happen, but that many? In this sort of industry, we must look for perfection and not just deadlines...quality over quantity.
Hopefully those in the field will study Glass' mistakes and learn from them. Of course it is possible, and unfortunately probable, for this issue to reoccur with some other journalist in some other publication, but it is the role of all those who are involved to make sure it does not.
I don't think there is any person, per se, to blame entirely for the actions of Stephen Glass. On the surface, there is. Glass is a self-serving person who wanted to cut corners (or, we could say "chop, sever, and slaughter corners") to gain esteem in his young professional career. And his editors were to blame for not caring enough about accuracy, for seeing only profits when they looked at the story. Yes, these people are to blame on the surface. But the reality is that these things will always happen while journalism remains a "business," where sensation rules over substance.
I truly believe that the only reason why this case is so crazy to all of us is because Glass actually got caught. This kind of thing, though maybe in lesser degrees, in absolutely happening all around us in journalism today. The increase in the use of unnamed sources is no help. I believe that journalists will abuse the trusting editor-reporter relationship that older editors expect, and I believe editors will continue to let personal friendships get in the way of professional duty. I believe the freelance system is even more able to be abused because the reporter is striving to build rapport with editors so they can get a job. It's this whole "journalism-business" model that begs the breeding of bad journalism, that invites egomaniacs to a profession meant to be humble and dutiful.
I think the blame needs to be assigned to several different sources. Obviously, Glass takes most of it, because it was he who fabricated the stories repeatedly. I do think that having such strict deadlines is tough, but that’s just a part of the business, so there’s only so much blame that can be put on that. I also hold the editors responsible who didn’t check up on him for years. Yes, we all make mistakes now and then, and get a name wrong or something, but what Glass did goes beyond that. He was making up people, places, companies, and then going to extreme measures to back it up. He knew he was wrong, but was so driven to be successful he didn’t care. Would he have made a website to cover his own ass if it was an honest mistake?
Unfortunately, there is always the potential for something like this to happen again. If an editor isn’t as diligent (like with the Jackie and Michelle case) and a reporter isn’t as morally sound as expected, this could happen. It sucks, but it’s a reality. People are always going to want to get ahead, gain some notoriety, and stand out. That doesn’t mean they will make the right choices in doing so. It’s unfortunate, but people will lie and cheat, so it’s up to everyone else to catch them.
There are many people and circumstances that could take the blame for what happened with Stephen Glass. Although he is the only one to truly blame and hold all true responsibility, there are still other sources that should be held partially accountable. The fact that it took so long for his fabrications to be discovered and for anyone to call him out on his lack of credible sources shows the laziness and inefficiency of The New Republic's editing process. Those editing his stories should have been paying more attention to his sources and the believability of his articles.
Also at fault could be Glass's educators and mentors throughout his life. Without the proper training and ethical reinforcement, a student could easily take the route that Glass did. Because he never seemed to understand the importance of high moral standards, it hurt him in the long run.
In order to prevent what happened, there should be more of a focus on ethics in his life previous to the New Republic episode.
I think it is possible for Stephen Glass's situation to be replicated because there are still so many people who do not do their job the way they should. Deadlines put pressure on people to take shortcuts and they will not hesitate to do so.
By definition, the fact-checkers and editors who reviewed Glass’s stories did their job. They cross-checked notes, interviews with sources, and checked “websites” where information came from. To them, the information was all there, it would have been hard for anyone to detect the complete fabrication because of the extent of the lies that were created.
But it being “hard” is different than being impossible. It was not impossible to uncover the truth with Glass’s stories. For example, if someone at the New Republic had called the “sources” when they sensed some question (as Jackie did in the Jackie-Michele case) or if they had genuinely attempted to meet with and verify these alleged interviews, and meetings, they would have found the truth a lot faster.
There’s no single culprit here. Glass is most obviously to blame for his intentional deceit, his lack of respect for the profession and its readers, and the damage he did. But his editors, and fact checkers, and peers who had been in the business before this novice came along should have known better than to blindly trust the sensational stories of a stranger. They should have used their training to thoroughly verify that what they were printing was not too good to be true.
An episode like this can always occur again. It’s becoming even easier now with the internet and its uncountable numbers of independent publications and “news” sources. Misinformation is even more prevalent than ever, and viewers on the internet often take whatever they read as gospel. This is a real problem because it not only breeds falsehoods, but perpetuates the contempt people are developing for journalism as a profession.
Although it seems like a common theme already that the ultimate blame falls on the editors for failing to recognize any inaccuracies and mistakes, I honestly feel that the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Stephen Glass.
While it is the job of the editors to fact check, eliminating mistakes and verifying the story that their writers create, there must be a certain level of trust between those working together for a common goal. No editor thinks that his people are purposely attempting to undermine their trust. Most probably go about their day thinking only of catching a typo or memorizing aspects of AP style, not being a psuedo-detective, trying to catch their co-workers and often times friends in a lying scheme. Any journalist setting out to purposely decieve those around him already has the upper hand because no one else assumes that they are lying, simply because no one goes through life with that level of mistrust.
Technically, yes the editors must accept some blame, because in the end, it is their job to catch such things. But in a real-life situation, considering emotions involved, I feel that any journalist who intentionally sets out to write a false account, when there are simply no real witnesses to fact check with, just the word of the journalist, playing on the trust placed in them by others, the blame cannot be placed elsewhere.
If I had to blame one initial person it would have to be Stephen Glass for irresponsibly acting under the pressure of journalism. I understand that the pressure to be timely could have triggered Glass’s actions. But, I think waiting on a story is always better than claiming an inaccurate or incomplete story as genuine.
Heavy fact-checking could have prevented Glass’s fabrications to make it to print. It is the job of all editors to make sure stories are accurate. If a fact can’t be confirmed, editors should choose not to print the story. In the case of Glass, he reached the extent to where he created a website that confirmed his story. I think fact checkers always need to take it the step further to make sure stories are accurate.
I think editors are choosing the incomplete story more and more in an effort to print a story before another publication. Until journalists figure out that it is not about competition or filling up the white space of a newspaper page, I think a similar episode is likely to occur.
There were several factors at work that allowed Stephen Glass' fabrications to be printed. First, there is the fact that most newsrooms don't discuss ethics in the workplace and with employees/colleagues. If no one talks about ethics it makes it seem as though ethics aren't particularly important at that establishment. With that thought in mind if ethics are supposedly unimportant in regards to journalism as it's practiced in real life it could make people more inclined to cheat or take their work less seriously in an ethical sense.
Another factor that is to blame would be the business model of journalism. When money is involved shortcuts are taken. It's always about making more money than your competitor so that you can keep making money, it's an endless cycle of events. When the pressure to put stories out and fill space is monetary it puts ethics on the back burner. I feel capitalism and ethics generally don't fit together without serious work attached to making it work.
There was a way to prevent what happened, through fact- and source-checking. The best way to prevent this is probably to weed out the dishonest journalists early on, maybe even before they enter the workforce as was mentioned in class. Instead of passing along bad journalists because you don't want to be accountable for their falsehoods.
I think another Stephen Glass could happen in a few years time because whenever someone like Stephen Glass comes to light as having violated the public trust people become vigilant - for a while. As time goes by and no other extreme instances surface, the vigilance becomes relaxed until it reaches the level of complacency that was achieved before the major incident woke everyone up. To truly prevent it, journalists and editors need to take it seriously all the time, not just when the public is watching.
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