a l l i e

"Who I am and what I want are a secret."

a journalist reports the truth and only the truth
but what happens when his story is just...a story?

This story comes to life in the form of a movie entitled "Shattered Glass". It tells a story about a man named Stephen Glass, who was a journalist in a magazine called "The new republic". It follows the rise and fall of this journalist, when his serial journalist fraud was exposed to the public. This movie was based on a true story, a crisis that occurred during the mid-1990s.

He was a student doing a law degree at Georgetown University Law Center and at the same time, he worked as a journalist in "the new republic". He wrote plenty of articles, and most of them received letters from the real people pointing out the faults and errors Glass had in his article. Yet, despite it all, "tnr" continued to stand and dismissed their accusations. The editor, Michael Kelly, fired off to one of them and demanded an apology for Glass.

But not long after that, Michael Kelly was sacked and Charles "Chuck" Lane took over the job of editor. And it was there where everything seemed to start falling apart.

Glass's biggest flaw was when he wrote the article "Hack Heaven".

Well, everything went well at first. He had everything in order, and nobody would've suspected anything. Here's a snippet from his main article.

Ian Restil, a 15-year-old computer hacker who looks like an even more adolescent version of Bill Gates, is throwing a tantrum. "I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic [book] number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy, and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!"...

Across the table, executives from a California software firm called Jukt Micronics are listening – and trying ever so delicately to oblige. "Excuse me, sir," one of the suits says, tentatively, to the pimply teenager. "Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you ..."

He wrote it as though he was there.

But when reporter Adam Penenberg from forbes.com read this article and did his own research, he found no evidence that Jukt Micronics or any of the people mentioned in that articles actually existed.

Glass fought back, giving out more evidence to prove the authenticity of his story by creating a web page for Jukt Micronics to prove its existence.

And he did mention that Jukt Micronics was a big software company. Now tell me, would a big software company come up with a website like this?

Chuck even went to the place itself to see if it truly existed. But I'm sure you all know what he saw.

Stephen Glass was fired. And next thing we knew, 27 out of 41 articles that he wrote contained fabricated materials. He later wrote a book called "The Fabulist", a biography of his life.

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Watching this movie sort of made me think about my future desired career. I aspire to be a journalist, or perhaps, at least a job that lets me write.

I'm not saying that I aspire to be like Glass and get away with things easily and such, though I must admit, it was the things that he did that made me interested. As I watched the movie, I imagined myself working in that kind of environment. And in there, they revealed the steps on publishing an article, and the complications one has to go through to just publish it.

And that was only a magazine.

I expect newspapers would be a lot more worse than magazines.

Glass's story was one thing. The other thing was the whole team work, team spirit and such. And there I realised the importance of the editor. Lol, all these while, I thought there would be only one editor. But editors exists in numbers and their job seemed so stressful.

I'm imagining myself working as an intern in one of these types of offices. Me, 21 years old, fresh from university, is suddenly chucked into such an environment.

*sigh* I don't know if I'm up for it.

And for once,

I'm really scared.