In journalism, you would expect to get the truth.

Stephen Randall Glass, writer for the “New Republic” was known for being a pathological liar. He got the opportunity to write a story for the “Rolling Stone” one of the most popular magazines of all times . Glass lied about more than half of the stories he wrote that were published. He made up lies after lies just trying to cover up his story. The one person that respected him as a truthful writer was Chuck Lane, his boss in the New Republic, and he also lied in his face.

The only reason Glass was getting caught up with his lies were from another magazine company called Forbes that had to go through his story and make sure it was legit. Due to the research that they did they found out that the whole story was made up. The information and notes Glass gave to them were invalid, they didn’t exist on any search engine. So that’s when they had to question his over the phone and have a face to face conversation with him. He still lied to their face.

Another journalist was Janet Cooke. She basically lied throughout her career life to get where she wanted to be. She made up a story about a eight year old heroin addict. Hearing that just made people want to go and get help for him many demanded her to reveal where the boy lived so that  he could be helped. But due to Cooke she said “I’m not able to tell what his last name is and where he lives, the drug dealers are going to be after me and my life will be at risk.” After hearing that people believed her because it sounded so real and knew that stuff like that really does happen.

Cooke had even won a Pulitzer prize from the story “Jimmy’s World” article. Later on the editors had found out that the story was made up and the boy didn’t even exist. So they had the right to take the award away from her. After that incident she disappeared.

The journalist that caught my attention was Jayson Blair, writer for the New York Times. Blair got caught plagiarizing the works of other reporters and supporting his own reports with fabricated details in multiple of different stories published in the New York Times. From what he did resulted to some of his peer writers to lose their job. Even though they had nothing to do with Blair’s stories, they were in charge of making sure it was legit and had no mistakes before it would get published.

It’s important for a journalist to be ethical because there job is to tell us people the truth about what’s going on in the world. We as the people want and expect to have the truth especially if it’s a story that’s going worldwide and its many people that are going to read it. I feel that the only way the media can stop is to call them out, not as in fighting but to go up to them and confront them about their false stories.