Lesson for journalism students

For the past week, we’ve been studying libel, slander, fabrication of news stories and other dirty words in the Mass Media Class I teach at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville.

I’ve tried to provide the class with some examples. We’ve studied what constitutes a public figure and discussed that gray land of what you can and cannot say in a news story. (And what you have to be careful about saying in the chapter on political correctness.)

Of course, the credibility of journalism has taken some huge blows over the past several years. It’s unfortunate when the reading public has to wonder if what it is reading is actually true or if it is made up.

Sadly, I've seen it happen at my own newspaper. It hurt then. It still hurts.

I hope my stern warnings have had an impact on my class. After all, they are members of the cut-and-paste generation. And when we shifted from plagiarism – they’ve all signed a code of honor with the university – we moved into outright fabrication.

I have been showing my class the movie “Shattered Glass.’’ I figured it would be a more effective lesson than anything I could teach them out a textbook.

The movie is based on the true story of Stephen Glass, a reporter for The New Republic in the late 1990s, who made up events, quotes and subjects of his stories. The New Republic later determined that 27 of the 41 stories he wrote for the magazine had been fabricated.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.