After Janet Cooke fabricated a pulitzer prize-winning story for The Washington Post, she sold the film rights to her ordeal to Columbia TriStar Pictures for $1.6 million, which was split between her and a few other people. The film has never been created.

After Jayson Blair fabricated and plagiarized articles for The New York Times, he wrote a tell-all memoir about his ordeal.

After fabricating stories for The New Republic, Stephen Glass wrote a book and also was the subject of a major motion picture - both of which put money in his bank account.

After talking about all of this in lecture, I wondered whether or not this was fair. In these days, notoriety can be a pretty profitable commodity. It seems as though Cooke, Glass, and Blair have all been rewarded for their stunts with million dollar movie deals, a spark to sell their books, and a lasting legacy (not a good one, but that doesn't always matter to some). After all, why work hard and devote your every waking thought to your journalism career when it's just as easy to make up all your stories and land a major motion picture deal after you get caught and be set for life?

That's one thing that appears to be emerging in American culture that I really don't care for. Dignity doesn't have the value that it used to. Everyone's can be bought or sold at a price, with the market price getting lower and lower.

Nothing at the surface is ever at face value, so you can't make any character judgments on the part of Cooke, Glass, and Blair. I just wish they could have set a better example and did not take a swipe at American journalism's creditibility.