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| Shattered Glass (2003) starring Hayden Christensen |
“He handed us fiction after fiction, and we printed them all as fact. Just because we found him ‘entertaining.’” – Chuck Lane, Shattered Glass (2003)
The quotation shown above is an excerpt from the film Shattered Glass which features the topic of credibility in the media industry. Credibility in the newspaper industry is a highly regarded pillar which should be maintained by journalists and writers alike. This very pillar determines the legitimacy of the media to the people without which the purpose of media reporting would cease. Taking into consideration the previous incidents that essentially attacked the legitimacy of the media, it becomes imperative to critically analyse how writers such as Jayson Blair and Patricia Smith were able to create fabrications and show it to the world as outright facts. Is this proof of the long disputed magic bullet theory? What are its implications to the capacity of the masses to know the difference between what is right and wrong? How exactly can we read between the lines?
Jayson Blair is a campus journalist in the University of Maryland, College Park for the school’s official newspaper The Diamondback. He served as the campus paper’s editor-in-chief for a year (1996-1997) during which other members of the editorial staff complained of four serious errors in Blair’s reporting including an award-winning article about a student who allegedly died of drug overdose. The members of the staff however claimed that the student really died of a heart disease (Folkenflik, n.p.). According to Felkenflik “[T]he disgraced journalist's closest peers were troubled by his work and behaviour at the University of Maryland, but no one heeded their warnings.” These incidents necessarily questioned Blair’s integrity as a campus journalist but nonetheless did not stop him in landing an internship in The New York Times. After his brief stint in the famous publication, he was offered an internship extension which he later refused claiming that he still has to finish university requirements for graduation. He returned to the newspaper a year later and immediately became a regular reporter in the field of mental health.
Everything seemed to be alright as far as Blair’s career is concerned until he received a call from Times national editor who asked him about a closely written article with one of the writers of San Antonio Express-News Macarena Hernandez. Upon discovering this mishap, a series of past articles purely fabricated managed to surface out such as his October 30, 2002 piece entitled US Sniper Case Seen as a Barrier to a Confession wherein he hinted that a suspect of a murder case is about to confess. Several other incidences came up eventually leading to the discovery that Blair didn’t even graduate from college as the university informed the publication that Blair still had one year worth of course work to complete.
The film Shattered Glass (2003) portrays the same story played by a young writer of New Republic who got busted for tailoring an intricate fabrication of a story about a boy hacker who managed to hack himself into a secure company network and extract the paychecks of every top employee. When people started to double check the facts, they find out that not only one of the writer’s works was done in the same manner. “You can resent me, you can hate me, but come Monday morning, we're all going to have to answer for what we let happen here,” says the New Republic editor Chuck Lane who tried to fix the mess they have done after trusting Stephen Glass, the fabricator/writer. When the fact checker got into a confrontation with Stephen and told him that there was indeed one piece of information that was correct among his articles, he said “[T]here does appear to be a state in the union named Nevada (n.p.).”
On the other hand, according to an article by the Boston Globe, Patricia Smith - a Pulitzer Prize finalist and columnist of the same publication was forced to resign her post “after admitting to fabricating characters in four of her columns (n.p.).” Her editor explained that Smith managed to attribute quotes to people who did not even exist. After Smith’s resignation, another columnist named Mike Barnicle committed the same crime “amid new allegations that he fabricated material for one of his columns published nearly three years ago (The Boston Globe, n.p.).” What’s bothering in the cases of Smith, Barnicle and Blair is that all of these journalists are known to be institutions in their own fields – the similar case to other individuals who attempted to fabricate stories, attribute unsaid quotes to non-existent characters and plagiarize published materials all of whom almost got away with it (The Boston Globe, n.p.).
The persistence of these types of crimes raises the question regarding the veracity of the magic bullet theory which basically assumes that the readers immediately believe what they hear, read and see from the media (DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach, 288). This theory has been repetitively disproved and disregarded – but considering the continuing cases of fabrication and plagiarism in the media industry, the masses are faced with the challenge of reading between the lines and thinking critically beyond what they read, beyond what they hear and beyond what they see.
Works Cited
Boston Globe,
The (August 19, 1998). “Barnicle resigns from Globe: fabrications found in 1995
column, “ The Boston Globe. Web.
DeFleur, M.
& Ball-Rokeach, S. (1989). Theories
of Mass Communication. Longman, London. Print.
