Saturday, February 7, 2009

Unforgivable

The interview of Stephen Glass after the movie was really interesting. I can very much understand the perspective of the men with whom he worked who said that they would never trust the guy again. They obviously took it to an extreme in their analogies as to how far they would have to go in order to believe him again, and it's true that his actions affected them greatly. Their reputations and ability to trust others has been forever shaken. The interview was done five years after the fact, and Stephen, it seemed, was taking his first steps in asking for forgiveness of the people he wronged on national television. Maybe this wasn't the best approach, but tell me what would have been.
The guy had been going through treatment for years to get over his tencency to lie, and maybe it all came to nothing. Maybe he is now, just as bad as he was in 1998, but then again, maybe not. I kind of feel bad for the guy because his reputation has been forever tarinshed. I know that what he did was horrible from an ethical perspective, but no matter what he does from here on out, he will be known as nothing more than that famous journalist that lied. I know that a lot of people are going to disagree with me, and I don't think there really is any remedy to this probelm, but I would just like to present it. I try to think of how I would handle the situation that he is in right now. He can do nothing to change the past, but nothing he does in the future will be any good now because of it. Because of something he cannot change.
Like I said, I don't know what the remedy to this would be, but I don't think that the treatment he will recieve for the rest of his life is very eithical from the standpoint of those who are treating him like that either. They may be within their rights to never trust the guy again, but that doesn't make it ethical.
The decisions we make will affect not only us but those with whom we work (editors, coworkers, subjects, etc.) so we have to choose wisely right now to make the right decisions. Hindsight is 20/20, so lets look at his past and learn from it so that we don't ever have to look at our own like he is looking at his.

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