'Shattered Glass' brings journalist ethics to all

By CHRISTOHER J. ORTIZ
The Rocky Mountain Collegian, Colorado State University

What Stephen Glass did at the New Republic did not make headline news, it did not call for a four-page retraction in the New York Times like the actions of Jayson Blair, but Glass' actions nearly brought down a small but prestigious magazine publication and showed how vulnerable the public and editors can be to the deception of corrupted journalists. Glass went well beyond Blair. He not only elaborated stories and sources, he simply made them up. He went as far as trying to pull off phony business cards and Web sites.
People outside of the journalism world might ask themselves what the relevance of Glass' story is, but the movie "Shattered Glass" makes it clear. What Glass did didn't bring down the magazine, it didn't make headline news, the journalism world wasn't brought to its knees like in the Blair case, but it did quietly show how much power and responsibility lies behind the keyboard of a journalist, and how easily that power can be corrupted.
Hayden Christensen portrays Stephen Glass, the young, ambitious freelance feature writer for the New Republic. Glass is depicted as a person who is quick to complement his co-workers and is quicker to say he is sorry to his editors for his mistakes. Well, at least the mistakes they caught.
In the movie, Glass was the guy everyone liked. He had the charisma and charm with his female coworkers and entertained his peers with the wild and exciting stories he was working on and making up. Glass, behind his big Harry Potter glasses and his oxford polo shirts and crisp ironed khakis, was well-liked by his editor Michael Kelly (played by the always dependable Hank Azaria) and was a tough act to follow when writers were sharing the stories they were working on.
But behind Glass was lies and deception. During his tenure at the New Republic, he fabricated dozens of stories, and not only did he have his co-workers believe the lies, he believed in them himself. When a reporter (Steve Zahn) starts following Glass, he finds that even basic facts were all made up in the creative mind of Glass.
The movie has a fast pace that allows the viewer to understand the sometimes-complicated nature of journalism and at the same time view the progression of the journalistic process that tracked down the truth behind Glass and his lies.
"Shattered Glass" is a great showcase of a marginal story put on the center stage. This conflict is what drives the action and suspense of the story line. Glass, in an attempt to cover up his lies, goes to extreme lengths and creates even bigger lies in the process.
"Shattered Glass" is a good, fast-paced film that has an underlying moral message behind the script. The film is not as dramatic as previous journalism movies such as "All the President's Men" and "The Paper," but it is enough to carry the movie through its 90 minutes and give the audience a hero in the editor that challenges Glass, Chuck Lane (Peter Sarsgaard) and an antihero, Glass, that people can sympathize with.