Comparing All The President's Men And Shattered Glass

All the President's Men

The film All the President's Men told the story of two reporters from the newspaper, The Washington Post, who uncovered and exposed the Watergate Scandal of 1972. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein took risks during the investigation, but both did impeccable jobs in exposing the truth behind Watergate - that President Richard Nixon's association was involved. The story led to public outrage, and eventually caused President Nixon to be the first president in the history of the United States to resign from office. The film expressed many aspects we studied in News Literacy this semester. A few of things we studied include an editor's role in choosing which stories to publish and news drivers, the verification process,

One specific concept revolves around the verification process. In All the President's Men, the journalists were very responsible in making sure that they checked their sources several times before confirming or denying their statements. When their editors demanded that they be checked and re-checked, the men were sure to take down all of the information, sometimes even verbatim. Also, the men were required to do fact-checks on the things that they claimed. In one scene, Ben Bradlee tells the two men, "Now hold it, hold it. We're about to accuse Mr. Haldeman, who only happens to be the second most important man in America, of conducting a criminal conspiracy from inside the White House. It would be nice if we were right." At that point, the men rushed to confirm every single detail that they claimed was true, only to be confirmed on all accounts. In Shattered Glass, Stephen Glass failed miserably in the verification process of his last piece, "Hacker Heaven". The place this process collapsed was during the source checks and confirmations. The reporters at FORBE's were unable to confirm any of the witnesses that Glass claimed he had spoken to. While he made a fake website, gave FORBE's phone numbers of people who posed as the "witnesses", Glass was caught red handed by his own editor after going back to the scene of the story; later to be found out the event he claimed he went to never existed. Comparing the two films allows news consumers to decipher between a successful and error-proof verification process and one that is so faulty it ends a