Letter from the editor: November 2003

How interesting that not one, but two recent movies are based on real-life stories with journalists as their central characters. One of the films, Veronica Guerin, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Cate Blanchett, is about the courage of an Irish reporter who took on the stop-at-nothing thugs behind Dublin's drug scene. For Guerin, the fact that the drug market was targeted to the city's poorest youth just made her all the more determined to expose the corruption of those who were getting rich off this pathetic culture of addiction.

Guerin was warned more than once that if she persisted with her investigations, continued to write about what she found, and named names, she would be punished. But she believed so much in the ethics of what she was doing and in the importance of bringing these criminals to justice that she couldn't be silenced. She was threatened, she was beaten up, she was scared, but she kept filing her stories until she was finally murdered--essentially for writing the truth.

What Veronica Guerin, the movie of her life, stands for is so different from that of Shattered Glass, this month's other film about a reporter, whose star, Hayden Christensen, is on our cover. Shattered Glass is really a story about not believing in anything other than getting ahead. Its main focus is the tale of Stephen Glass, a young reporter at The New Republic who was so focused on success that he made up much of what he wrote. He fabricated stories that were sensational and would seem like coups. Glass seems to have completely lost the plot about what journalism is meant to do. But unfortunately, he succeeded in his deceptions. And just like The New York Times' recent episodes with Jayson Blair, another reporter who broke every written and unwritten rule of journalism, when the truth about Glass emerged, people were dumbstruck. How could this happen, they asked? How could someone write stories which are so patently false, yet they end up in print? Even as cover stories, no less?

Glass and Blair are embodiments of journalism's worst nightmare. Both were fired, but that didn't mitigate the fallout. The need to think about how this could have happened is vital--the questions are too important. One hopes that newspapers and magazines have such good checks and balances that these kinds of things aren't allowed to happen. But they did, and sad to say, it's naive to think that Glass and Blair are alone in their fabricating ways. What does that mean for those of us who still believe--as we do at Interview--that newspapers and magazines are honorable vehicles that are really here to help change the world for the better? I think stories like Shattered Glass are reminders that journalists and editors must do everything in our power to uphold the public's trust.

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