Assignment 6

Part I
1. Steven Glass: This young journalist charmed and wowed his superiors with his amazing stories and apparent luck of being everywhere when anything happened. He was young, but they were the naive ones. As it turned out, he totally took then on a ride to Fabricationville, where all his stories were actually fake. This totally tainted the papers reputation, not to mention his own. But he did have a movie made after his own story, cleverly titled Shattered Glass. Jeez, did it air on Lifetime Network? The moral of the story: If the guy seems to good to be true...he IS.

2.Jayson Blair: The 27-year-old journalist who somehow got hired by the New York Times, was found to have plagiarized 36 of the 76 articles he wrote for them, including one which he stole from a Texan newspaper. But it didn’t stop at his own journalistic demise. He, and two of his editors also resigned shortly thereafter. The clincher is that they knew that he was up to no good, and had planned to get rid of him for months. The moral of the story: If you let a plagiarizing journalist continue to do so, it’s on your head too.

3. Jack Kelley: His work for USA Today not only savagely terminated his own career, it also tarnished the reputations of some of the people he wrote about which included a woman he claimed to have died on her way to Cuba. If the Cuban authorities had found out her identity, she would have lost her chance at emigration. After a team of twenty journalists and reviewers found that most of his stories were untrue or unsubstantiated, many of them major– they fired him. Moral of the story: If it takes more man-power, time and energy to rat out a crappy reporter than it does for Kelley to write a decent story, that one’s on USA Today.

4. Janet Cooke: She wrote the brilliant and provocative story about a day in the life of an 8-year-old heroin addict from South Washington. I guess I can’t blame her editors for believing the story, it sounds realistic enough to me. But although it garnered her a Pulitzer prize, no doubt, it was found that she completely made the story up. However fake it was, that did not stop the current mayor for looking for the boy and claiming to have found him and put him in treatment.
Moral of the story: I hope Jimmy isn’t still out there trying to get his fix, especially if he finds out that he doesn’t actually exist...

Part II
In the Spring/Summer of 2005, a journalist for the Mustang Daily apparently plagiarized stories for her column from various web sites. In an article reporting the scandal, it speculated that the journalist was a certain Rebecca Laman because the publication corrected several of her articles. The ethical dilemma was whether or not local publications should reveal her name.
Part III.
1. CorpWatch: This is an organization that works to promote democratic and free journalism– rather than corporate-influenced. It is based in Oakland, CA(www.wikipedia.com).
2. Globalwitness: It is an organization that fights to "expose the corrupt exploitation of natural resources and international trade systems, to drive campaigns that end impunity, resource-linked conflict, and human rights and environmental abuses"(www.globalwitness.org).
3.Labourstart: A group that is represented by the trade union, that seems to lobby for all kinds of unions. It syndicates stories from many countries using many mediums(www.wikipedia.com). 4. Associated Press: a.k.a AP, currently has a monopoly of the news in America because it cooperates with various publications to get the news out. People pay for and contribute to the AP, and its style book is the journalist’s Bible (www.wikipedia.com).
5. Reuters: A news service that provides news, like the AP, but mostly financial statistics much like Bloomberg and Dow Jones (www.wikipedia.com.
6. Electronic authorization partnership: no information found
7. David Romero: He is a percussionist who has somehow gotten 22,222 hits on his website. He plays various styles of music an has an impressive gig list (http://www.david-romero.com)./
8. Jack T. O’Connell: Jack served as the Superintendent of Public Instruction on the Central Coast from 2002-2006. Unless he was too excited over his reelection to update his website, it appears that he was beat out by his opponent. I offer my condolences to you, Jack (http://www.oconnell2006.com)./
9. Julie L. Rodewald: She is the county records clerk in San Luis Obispo County. Apparently, that’s a big deal. I found this out from the New Times website (http://www.newtimes-slo.com/archive/2004-06-02/classif/public.html)
10. Deborah Linden: She was named "entrepreneur of the year" by the "Orlando Business Journal." She is the CEO of Island One Resorts (http://orlando.bizjournals.com/orlando/stories/2006/10/02/smallb1.html).
***amendment***
The Deborah Linden I am sure you intended students to find is the one located in SLO, who serves as Chief of the SLO Police Dept.