Journalism
is a serious business, according to Shattered
Glass. Directed by Billy Ray, the film is
a biopic of Stephen Glass (played by Hayden Christensen),
an associate editor of The New Republic until
1998, when he was found to be fabricating stories. The
film operates at four levels. One level consists of a few
voiceovers, in which Glass tries to present his own point
of view. The second level is a lecture about magazine journalism
that he presents to a high school journalism class at his
alma mater, Highland Park High School, a Detroit suburb.
The third level is a chronology of Glass's tenure on The
New Republic. The fourth level consists of titles
at the end of the film that update filmviewers on the current
status of some of the major figures in the film. The most
informative part of the film is a description, step by
step, of how an idea for a story moves through a process
of fact checking, writing, rewriting, scrutiny by a lawyer,
as well as a presentation to a staff meeting, where the
median age of fifteen writers is twenty-six; Glass is booted
out at age twenty-four. In addition, filmviewers see that
there are several hierarchical levels--an apprentice writer,
an associate editor, the senior editor, and the publisher
Martin Peretz. (The latter, played by Ted Kotcheff, is
portrayed as more interested in commas than in content.)
How was Glass able to pull the wool over the eyes of so
many over a period of two or more years? The answer is
that Glass ingratiated himself into the good graces of
everyone in the staff and mesmerized everyone at staff
meetings by dramatizing phony stories that relied on facts
which could not be rechecked because they were backed up
by manufactured interview notes. The first article that
arouses suspicion occurs in 1997, when Glass claims that
delegates were getting plastered during a convention of
conservative Republicans, drinking from small bottles of
alcohol found in the minibar of a hotel suite, whereas
the hotel has no minibars. Glass slides out of the false
story by saying that he saw the kinds of small bottles
found in minibars, so the occupants of the suite must have
rented the small refrigerator from the hotel. The senior
editor, Mike Kelly (played by Hank Azaria), verifies that
the hotel does indeed rent small refrigerators, but he
cannot recheck any other fact, so Glass is off the hook.
In 1998, however, his fabrications about a supposed convention
of computer hackers are spotted by Adam Penenberg (played
by Steve Zahn) by the Forbes online news service. The senior
editor of The New Republic that year, Chuck Lane
(played by Peter Sarsgaard), confronts Glass about persons
identified in the story who do not answer telephone calls
and places where events supposedly occurred that turn out
to be nonexistent. Lane then fires him when he surmises
that Glass is using his brother's telephone number to back
up his lies. When Lane asks other associate editors to
recheck facts in other stories, they agree that Glass deservedly
was fired for making up 27 of the 41 articles that he penned.
Next, The New Republic prints an apology to its
readers, and presumably magazine journalism gets back to
the serious business of informing the public. But there
is a more important subtext to the message in the film,
one missed by the superficial journalism of most film critics
for the same reason. Glass delights his colleagues with
trivial, gossipy stories with little policy relevance,
and one offhand remark by another character early in the
film is that Time increasingly is printing stories that
might fit in People magazine. In short, Shattered
Glass tells filmviewers that the content
of magazine journalism is being dumbed down, partly because
of the need to increase readers but mostly because the
writers are too young to have enough experience and knowledge
to write about real issues in a complex world. College
courses in English and journalism evidently fail to provide
the sagacity to undertake serious policy analysis. Lauded
in the film as the inflight magazine of Air Force One,
the reputation of The New Republic may have been
damaged by a few phony stories, but the real apology to
the readers should be that the American press has stopped
playing the vital role of checking the government. Meanwhile,
officeholders are following suit by promoting their own
fabricated balderdash so that they can sacrifice the lives
of real people, not only by tolerating millions of persons
without health care insurance but also by committing thousands
of troops to questionable military adventures. In short,
politicians keep lying so long as the press is only interested
in increased sales, and democracy is on the critical list.
Accordingly, the Political Film Society has nominated Shattered
Glass as best film raising consciousness
about the need for more democracy and best film exposé of
2003. MH
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