Shattered glass cannot be glued back together

Every single one of us have lied. I still remember the moment I broke my own innocence. I was sitting on the dark blue carpet in the living room of the house I grew up in, maybe six-years-old. My dad and I were playing “Candy Land.”

I so badly wanted to win.

There’s this card with a fairy on it in my memory and if you get that card, you win. As if it were five-minutes ago, my dad got up to make us some snacks and I was in charge of shuffling the deck. He came back and let me go first, just like good dads do.

And I won.

“Did you put that card on top on purpose?”

“Just got lucky.”

Years later, I never told him still. I doubt he even remembers, but I wish I could tell him that I do.

But I was young, dumb and greedy. I wasn’t a journalist pegged with reporting the facts to my readers yet. I wasn’t relied on by many. It wasn’t my job.

It’s a journalist’s responsibility to be the voice for the voiceless, the sharer of truth and to speak openly, honestly and accurately. Stephen Glass, a once shining star at The New Republic as a journalist, burned out.

In the 2003 film, “Shattered Glass,” his rise and fall is portrayed. The young associate editor at the publication brings these elaborate stories to pitch meetings. He entrances his audience of editors and fellow writers by finding these type of stories. Out of the 41 articles Glass wrote, according to the movie, 27 of the articles contained fabricated material and had to be retracted.

Glass invented events, people, details, quotes -- he invented whole articles. He would tell his editors he found these phenomenal stories that would pass the copy editing process and go to print. The story that finally exposed his lack of journalistic techniques was in “Hack Heaven” where he created a 15-year-old hacker that was hired by Jukt Micronics. Neither the hacker nor the company existed. Glass went to great lengths to hide his plagiarism by having his brother pose as the company’s manager and even created a website for the fake company. Finally, he was tangled in his own web of lies when Adam Penenberg of “Forbes” digital and new Editor Charles Lane believed him. Glass was fired and along with it his reputation would be forever tainted.

Glass is everything I never want to be.

As a young journalist myself, there was never a moment where I wanted to skew the facts. There was never a brief, fleeting thought of “if only this story could be slightly different.” There was never a second of “I wonder if I can get away with creating my own story.”

I don’t know what was going through Glass’ mind every time he lied -- was he scared? Was he pressured? Did he understand the trust he was violating?

Did he know?

At age six I did.

Sarah Litz