The New Republic, the Washington, DC magazine/journal founded in 1914, has a reputation for its political and cultural influence. It is rumoured, as they say in the film Shattered Glass, to be the in-flight magazine of Air Force One¹. 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 of 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 age was 26, meaning that 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.

The Set-up

Yet Glass seemed — on the surface, anyway — to be a humble and considerate young man with more than his fair share of luck who always seemed to stumble upon the 'right' kind of story. His were the funny, the humorous, the 'quirky' stories that other writers just seemed to somehow miss or overlook, a great mystery to other journalists at the magazine. However, for the most part they didn't question Glass's success. He just had a way about him and that was that. But soon trouble would begin when Glass penned a story about a convention he claimed to have attended called, he said, the 'National Assembly of Hackers'.

According to Glass, he had met at the computer hackers' assembly a young boy named Restell who had hacked into the mainframe of a software giant called Jukt Micronics and then proceeded to post the salaries of everyone who worked there along with his signature hack name: 'the big bad bambino was here' or something along those lines.

Jukt apparently decided it was easier 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); his parents; the hacker's manager, a man named Heirt; and the Jukt representatives and their attorney.

At said lunch, the kiddo makes his demands: he wants, he says, millions of dollars — or hundreds of thousands, 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 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. 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 him? He has a knack for coming up with the quirky and this simply follows suit.

Secondly, as was previously mentioned, 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 does something wrong, as if the world were his mommy and the staff owed him some sympathy for being young and screwing up occasionally.

The Scandal

As it turned out (what a surprise!) so much of what Glass penned at the New Republic had 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 an interview on the American talk show 60 Minutes), soon progressed to entire stories that were fabricated and made of nothing but air.

Glass had managed to gain the trust of the public and his editor by initially printing stories that were 'mostly true' but adding quotes to make them 'perfect' or more interesting. 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' story, 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.

Glass went out of his way to create the illusion that such things existed once he realised that another magazine was 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 wondered.

It wasn't long before a writer at an online magazine discovered that the whole Jukt Micronics story smelt fishy and ultimately proved it false. So after much investigation and hard research, Forbes Online magazine decided to run a story about the New Republic, the lies that had been told and the lack of journalistic professionalism.

First, the online magazine checked for Jukt Micronics on every available search engine and found that there was no company called Jukt, nor was there any kid named Restell or agent named Heirt supposedly representing this fourteen-year-old hacker.

Glass went a long way to reinforce his fabrication, designing a website meant to be that of Jukt Electronics, but in the end the URL is a dead giveaway and says more than if he had done nothing: name a professional firm that would have 'members.aol.juktm.html.com' in its URL... Moreover, the business cards for Heirt, the kid's agent, looked as though they were created overnight by an amateur. And they were, by Glass himself. The hackers' conference never happened, as it turned out; and although his editor, Chuck Lane, backs Glass for a long time, even he soon grew weary of Glass's lies and the embarrassment he was causing, not only to himself but at this point to the whole staff — not to mention the reputation of one of the foremost magazines in the United States.

It's not that the magazine's editor, Chuck Lane, wanted to bring Glass down. At first, to his credit as a friend and a supportive editor, he tried hard to protect Glass against the story that was about to run in the online magazine, saying 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'.

Problem is, the Forbes Online editor said, the story is just too good: after all, when does someone have dirt of this magnitude on the New Republic, and Forbes Online intended to run it. One could argue there is a journalistic requirement that they run the story: serious journalism demands that such 'inventive' 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 threatened 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 journalistic 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 Kelly² was asked to leave New Republic and Chuck Lane took his place. For one, Kelly and Glass had been close, and Kelly had covered for Glass a great deal. Though Shattered Glass 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, unlike Chuck Lane.

Glass's house of cards came crashing down as Lane discovered more and more fabrication in each of Glass's stories. It seemed as though the fabrications would never end. During the 60 Minutes interview that followed the news and break of this story in the late nineties, Glass admitted that almost everything he wrote was fabricated, and that, worse, he had created and fabricated notes and sources to fool and trick the fact-checkers and other editors to whom he had ingratiated himself already and who were, in some cases, his friends. Having once been a fact-checker, Glass knew how to do it, 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 false quotes from sources.

The Consequences

What is important here, and it is demonstrated in the film Shattered Glass, is that playing the role of 'the kid' largely enabled Glass to get away with his lies 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 with. It was too perfect, yet no one ever suspected Glass and when the story did break, it was a bitter pill for Glass's co-workers to swallow and many of them stood by Glass to the end, believing that Lane was 'just out to get Glass' because Glass 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, which Glass never could.

Glass was smart and 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.

Glass stood by his story about hacking and other phony stories until, finally, Lane had enough and asked Glass to leave the building and take nothing with him. Glass wasn't permitted to touch his computer, his rolodex, nor back up files: nothing - he's just asked to leave and that is that. Glass left with only his law books and was 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 his computer so that they could be used as evidence.

Many people, including Chuck Lane, prophesied that this would be the end of the New Republic. No doubt it was a scandal, but 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.

It is nothing short of amazing, though, that Glass got as far as he did in publishing and that he even got 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 writers and employees. The question for New Republic now is 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 his 60 Minutes interview. Why should anything that came before count or be of any credit on Glass's resume?

Glass eventually 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.