The New Republic, the well-known and trusted Washington magazine/journal founded in 1914 has a reputation for its political and cultural influence. It is rumored, as they say in the film Shattered Glass, to be the in-flight magazine of Air Force One. Whether or not this is true is hard to verify and one would think that even if it is true, there are naturally other magazines as well. Regardless, it is but one piece of information from the film Shattered Glass, the story about Stephen Glass and how he managed to fool one of America’s most prestigious and respected magazines ~ The New Republic.
The magazine came under fire in the late 1990s solely because of the writings of a young, self-professed “talented” and overly apologetic journalist (not to mention ingratiating) employee– a young man by the name of Stephen Glass. Glass was, at the time, the youngest employee at a magazine where the median was 26, meaning Glass was likely even younger than that or just at that age. To be in such a position of authority at such an authoritative magazine would be enough to go to anyone’s head to some extent; simply writing for The New Republic has been known to swell egos.
Yet Glass seemed, on the surface anyway, to be a humble and considerate young man with more than his fair share of luck and who always seemed to stumble upon the “right” kind of story. His were the funny, the humorous, the what you would call “quirky” stories that other writers just seemed to somehow miss or overlook, surely at the time, a great mystery surely to other journalists at the magazine. However, for the most part they didn’t question Glass’s success. Stephen just had a way about him and that was that. But soon trouble would begin when glass penned a story about a convention Glass claimed to have attended called, he said, the “National Assembly of Hackers.”
According to Glass, he had at the hacker’s assembly, met a young boy named Restell who had hacked into the mainframe of a software giant by the name of Jukt Micronics and then proceeded to post the salaries of everyone who worked there along with his signature hack name, something along the lines of “the big bad bambino was here” or something along those lines.
Jukt, the software giant, decided it was easier, Glass wrote, to hire the kid and offer him whatever he wanted than to try to build security to keep him and other hackers out. This was all decided over a lunch at which Glass was present along with Restell (the hacker), the hacker’s parents, the hacker’s manager, a guy-named “Heirt” and the Jukt representatives and their attorney.
At said lunch, kiddo makes his demands; he wants, he says, a Miata, millions of dollars or hundreds of thousand anyway. He demands several years’ subscription to Playboy and Penthouse. The company agrees to all demands, but say they’ll give him the money for the pornography and his parents can subscribe for him when he “reaches a more appropriate age.”
Then, Glass wrote, Restell goes back into the assembly of hackers and is their new found hero. He hops atop a speaker or stage of some kind (Glass can’t remember exactly what) and begins to gyrate and chant saying, “Show me the money!!! I wanna Miata… I wanna Playboy… I want Penthouse…” and so on. The crowd goes crazy. And, in the meeting where Glass presents this story, he also acts it out, standing on his own chair in the conference room supposedly mimicking Restell’s movements and the staff at The New Republic is in fits.
The story is smart, funny, Glass has taken copious notes (they are at home, he says) and besides which, why would anyone doubt Stephen? He has a knack for coming up with the quirky and this simply follows suit.
Secondly, as I noted earlier, Glass has ingratiated himself to almost everyone and runs about the office like a five year old saying “Are you mad at me?” whenever he screws up, as if the world were his mommy and he had just been weaned and the staff owed him some sympathy for being young and screwing up, when he did screw up, as most people do.
As it will turn out, quelle surprise, so much of what Glass has penned at The New Republic has been fabricated. All of the great and quirky stories while maybe having one fact that was true (at least initially, according to Glass himself in a 60 minutes interview), soon progressed to entire stories that were fabricated and made of nothing but air.
Glass had managed to, by initially printing stories that were “mostly true” but adding quotes to make them “perfect” or more interesting, gain the public’s and his editor’s trust. He could ride on this trust for a long time, because his lies were progressive. Each story contained fewer and fewer grains of truth until soon, as with the National Assembly of Hackers, it would turn out that not only was there no National Assembly of Hackers but more, and perhaps worse, there had not even been a convention, no place where they had met, no lunch, no kid named Restell, no agent named Heirt and certainly there was no company that anyone could find named Jukt Micronics.
Oh, Glass goes out of his way to create the illusion that such things existed once he realizes that another magazine is riding the tail of The New Republic, catching the big boys at last in a whopper of a lie. But could it really be true? A writer at The New Republic making up a whole story and inventing a company, contriving to fool the finest and brightest brains in the country? The writers at online magazines, not unlike this online magazine wondered.
It is not long before the writer of an online magazine discovers that the whole Jukt Micronics story smells fishy and ultimately proves not to be true. So after much investigation and hard research Forbes Online magazine decides to run a story about The New Republic and the lies that have been told and the journalistic lack orofessionalism.
First, the online magazine checks for Jukt Micronics on every available search engine and finds there is no company called Jukt nor is there any kid named Restell or agent named Heirt supposedly representing this fourteen-year-old hacker.
Glass will go along way to hold up his fabrication. He designs” a web site but the end the URL is a dead giveaway and says more than if he had done nothing. Name a professional firm with a URL that would have “members.aol.juktm.html.com” in its URL. More, the business cards for Heirt, the kid’s agent, look as though they were done overnight by an amateur. And they were, by Glass himself. The hacker’s conference never happened as it will turn out, and although his editor, Chuck Lane, backs Glass for a long time, even he soon grows weary of Glass’s lies and the embarrassment he is causing not only himself but at this point, the whole staff and not to mention the reputation of one of the most important magazines full-stop.
It’s not that the Editor, Chuck Lane, wants to bring Glass down. He doesn’t and he tries hard to not let that happen. At first, to his credit as a friend and a supportive editor, he tries hard to protect Glass against the story that will run in the online magazine and says to the other editor, “Can we speak editor to editor” “Look, we’ve discovered something that a troubled kid has done,” and though he is not worried about “himself or the magazine, [he] wishes to handle it internally.” he says.
Problem is, the Forbes Online editor says, the story is just too good – after all, when does someone have dirt of this magnitude on The New Republic - and Forbes Online will run it. One could argue there is a journalistic requirement or demand that they run with the story: serious journalism demands that such “inventive” (at best) self-professed “journalists” and kamikaze intellectuals be “outed”, so to speak, and as soon as possible. Integrity is the basis for all that journalism is, and all that journalism stands for. For Glass to get away with what he did, threatens the very foundation of a reliable and free press.
Yes, it may be that “this kid” as Glass is called in Shattered Glass, had his whole career on the line, but that doesn’t change the fact that there were bigger issues concerning journalism philosophy that would and did effect the practice of journalism forever and if not corrected at the time, the precedent would stand that fabricating sources and creating stories that never occurred is somehow acceptable as long as it makes any publication “more interesting.”
Glass’s problems really begin when Editor Michael Kelly (Michael Kelly eventually landed as Editor at The Atlantic Monthly and sadly, was killed in Iraq in a car accident during this present war.) When Kelly is asked to leave TNR and Chuck Lane takes his place and here the problems really begin. For one, Kelly and Glass had been close, and Kelly had covered for Glass a great deal, though the film indicates that he suspected Glass, he seemed always to catch him before he fell. Not to say that Kelly covered for Glass in any way, only that he was less vigilant about going out of his way to fact check as Chuck Lane will soon be.
Glass’s house of cards comes crashing down as Lane discovers more and more fabrication in each of Glass’s stories. It seems the fabrication never stops. During the sixty minute interview that followed the news and break of this story in the late nineties, Glass admitted that almost everything he wrote was fabricated. That these were stories of thin air and that worse, he created and fabricated notes and sources to fool and trick the fact-checkers and other editors with and to whom he had ingratiated himself to already and who were in some cases, his real friends and in one case, a romantic relationship. Having once been a fact-checker, Glass knew how to do this; knew what would be required and provided it, even to the extent of creating phony newsletters, business cards and Web sites just to support his claims as well as “notes” and quotes from sources.
What is important here, and it is well-demonstrated in the film Shattered Glass is that by playing the role of “the kid” and the “junior” and so on, largely enabled Glass to get away with his lies and for a long time. He was “such a nice guy” and was truly “so entertaining” and let’s not forget how “smart” he was and how many “great stories” he had come up. It was too perfect, yet no-one ever suspected Glass and more, when the story did break, it was a bitter pill for Glass’s coworkers to swallow and many of them stood by Glass to the end, believing that Lane was “just out to get Glass” because he was still loyal to Michael Kelly. This is not to say that there aren’t journalists who truly are entertaining, funny, gifted, and smart and all the things that Glass so desperately wanted to be; the key difference is that those individuals can back-up their work, Glass never could.
Glass was smart, he was certainly entertaining, but was he really a “nice” guy? In the final account, that is a question that only those who are/or were intimate with Glass can answer. We know for a fact that he pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes, including those people whom he supposedly loved.
To the bitter end, Glass will stand by his story about hacking and other phony stories until, finally, Lane has had enough and asks Glass to leave the building and take nothing with him. He cannot even touch his computer, his rolodex, nor back up files: nothing. He is just asked to leave and that is that. Glass leaves with only with his law books and stripped of his security key and security pass. It is the ultimate moment of humiliation to be sure, but no doubt, intended in part to be so and also to protect the magazine because Glass could not be trusted to leave the documents on the computer so that they could be used as evidence.
Many people, including Chuck Lane, prophesized that this would be the end of The New Republic. No doubt, it was a scandal, but The New Republic still stands and seems to have suffered ultimately very little. The public and the press have been forgiving and the magazine seems to have reclaimed its former stature for the most part if not entirely.
But Glass, well he just never gives up, and his lies seem to be without any clear end. One starts to wonder if Glass really knows the difference between reality and non-reality – if this isn’t some case of pseudologica fantastica. Reality and non-reality sort of coexist and blend in Glass’s mind in a magical and lyrical way, yes, but not in a way that is ever going to pass as serious journalism.
It is nothing short of amazing that Glass got as far as he did in publishing and that he even get a job at The New Republic. We can only hope that the standard has been raised since Glass’s time there concerning the integrity of its writers and employees. The question for TNR now is only how much of Glass’s resume was fabrication in the first place? How many of his publishing credits can we call real and why should they count? To this day, Glass has landed serious publishing contracts with reportedly large advances according to the 60 Minutes interview. Why should anything that came before count or be of any credit on Glass’s resume?
In the final account, Glass dropped out of sight and wrote a book called “The Fabulist” for which he reportedly received a large advance. Interestingly, the book is billed as “fiction.”
It may be the one true thing that Glass has written so far.
Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti
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