Ethics and journalism should go hand and hand, like school and students. Journalist must take responsibility for their writings.

Stephen Randall Glass was a pathological liar. He told made up stories to keep his job. Some examples of these made up lies are “Hackers Heaven, Vanity Fair, and Young Republic.” He created characters and places. He was such a good liar he almost made these things sound believable.

Stephen was caught because he couldn’t keep all the lies in order. And once Chuck reread all his articles he found over half his articles were made up. Stephen Glass is now working to become a lawyer.

Janet Cooke made up an eight year old drug addict that lived in Washington. It was made believable when it said “the heroin problem in the district has grown to epidemic proportions”. When she wrote this story, she received the Pulitzer Prize. Which upped her status in the journalism world. But, when they found out it was a lie the prize and her job was taken.

Cooke was caught because she lied on her resume about where she went to college.  She now lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan and works as a store clerk.

Jayson Blair plagiarized other peoples work. He took stories from other reporters around the country. He resigned before he could get fired, he was written about and criticized in a major way.

It’s important that reporters are ethical because the reader have to be able to trust what they’re reading.