Stephen Glass

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Image:Stephen glass.jpg
Stephen Glass on 60 Minutes.
For the Scottish football (soccer) player, see Stephen Glass (footballer).

Stephen Glass (born 1972) is a former American reporter for The New Republic who was fired for fabricating articles, quotes, sources and events. The story of Glass's downfall is told in the 2003 film Shattered Glass.

Contents

[edit] Childhood

Stephen Glass attended Fredonia High School in Fredonia, New York and initially planned on going into the business field. His parents, John and Sharon Glass, were both very prominent in the local business scene and were the cause for his business inspiration. It wasn't until his high school years when he met his journalism teacher, Lisa Reinhardt, that inspired him to major in the field. It was because of her that he changed his plans, and entered into college intending to major in journalism.

[edit] College and Beyond

He went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the executive editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian, the university's student newspaper.[1]

Following his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, he rose quickly to national prominence in the competitive world of political journalism, writing articles for The New Republic when he was only 23 years old. While employed full-time at TNR Glass also wrote occasional pieces for magazines such as Policy Review, George, Rolling Stone and Harper's.

[edit] New Republic scandal

Image:Jukt Micronics fake web page.jpg
A screenshot of the webpage that Glass had created to try to prove his claim that Jukt Micronics existed.

There had been warning signs. Joe Galli of the College Republican National Committee and David Keene of the American Conservative Union both wrote letters to TNR accusing Glass fabrications in "Spring Breakdown," his lurid tale of drinking and debauchery at the 1997 Conservative Political Action Conference. D.A.R.E. accused Glass of falsehoods in his March 1997 article "Don't You D.A.R.E.".[2] The Center for Science in the Public Interest, the target of a hostile Glass article in December 1996 called "Hazardous to Your Mental Health" wrote a letter to the editor and a press release pointing out inaccuracies, distortions, and possible plagiarism in Glass' article.[3][4] A June 1997 article called "Peddling Poppy" about a Hofstra University conference on George H. W. Bush drew a letter to the editor from Hofstra reciting Glass' errors.[2] Magazine owner Martin Peretz later admitted that his wife told him that she found Glass' stories incredible and had stopped reading them.[5] The New Republic, however, continued to stand behind their star young writer. Editor Michael Kelly fired off an angry letter to C.S.P.I. calling them liars and demanding they apologize to Glass.[1]

Glass was finally caught in May 1998. The story that triggered his downfall appeared in the May 181998 issue. It was called "Hack Heaven", and concerned a supposed 15-year-old computer hacker, who was purportedly hired to work for a large company as an information security consultant after breaking into their computer system and exposing its weaknesses. Like several of Stephen Glass's previous stories, "Hack Heaven" depicted events that were almost cinematic in their vividness and that were told from a first-person perspective implying Glass was there as the action took place. The article opened as follows:

Ian Restil, a 15-year-old computer hacker who looks like an even more adolescent version of Bill Gates, is throwing a tantrum. "I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic [book] number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy, and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!"...
Across the table, executives from a California software firm called Jukt Micronics are listening – and trying ever so delicately to oblige. "Excuse me, sir," one of the suits says, tentatively, to the pimply teenager. "Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you ..."

Soon after the publication of "Hack Heaven," Forbes.com reporter Adam Penenberg read the article and did his own research. He failed to find any evidence that Jukt Micronics or any of the people mentioned in the story even existed.[6] When Penenberg and Forbes confronted TNR with this, Glass claimed that he had been duped. TNR editor Charles Lane suspected something different. Seeking any confirmation for the story, Lane asked Glass to take him to the Hyatt hotel in Bethesda, Maryland where Restil supposedly met with the Jukt Micronics executives, and to the conference room next door that held the hacker conference. Glass described the details of the meeting and insisted his story was accurate, but Lane discovered that the conference room was closed on the day Glass said the hackers had met there.[1] Lane dialed a Palo Alto number for Jukt Micronics that Glass gave him and actually found a real person who identified himself as George Sims, a Jukt executive. When Lane found out from a passing remark by another TNR editor that Glass had a brother at Stanford University in Palo Alto, where "Sims" called from, he realized that Glass had gotten his brother to pose as Sims. Lane immediately fired Glass.[7] An internal review by TNR found that Glass had created a shell website and voice mail account for the company in order to deceive TNR's fact checkers. Glass also had fake business cards printed and presented fabricated notes to TNR factcheckers.

TNR subsequently determined that at least 27 of 41 stories written by Glass for the magazine contained fabricated material. Some, such as "Don't You D.A.R.E.", contained fabricated quotes and incidents woven in with real reporting, while others, such as the infamous "Hack Heaven", were completely made up. Of the remaining 14 articles, Lane said, "In fact, I'd bet lots of the stuff in those other fourteen is fake, too. ... It's not like we're vouching for those fourteen, that they're true. They're probably not, either."[8] Rolling Stone, George and Harper's also reviewed his work in their respective publications. Rolling Stone and Harper's found the material generally accurate but had no way of verifying information from Glass' anonymous sources. George discovered Glass fabricated quotes in a profile piece and apologized to the article's subject, Vernon Jordan, a Clinton advisor. Some commentators of the scandal considered it to be a great coming-of-age achievement for online journalism.[9]

[edit] Shattered Glass

A movie presenting a stylized view of Glass's rise and fall, titled Shattered Glass, was released in 2003. The screenplay aimed to portray both the high-pressure world of national political journalism and the inside workings of a national political magazine. Hayden Christensen starred as Glass.

[edit] Recent career

Stephen Glass completed his law degree at Georgetown University Law Center after being fired by TNR, and passed the written portion of the New York state bar exam, but has not yet been admitted to the bar. In 2003, he began appearing on television to promote his "biographical novel" The Fabulist. "I wanted them to think I was a good journalist, a good person. I wanted them to love the story so they would love me", he told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes in an interview, which was included as a special feature for the DVD edition of Shattered Glass. Also in 2003, Glass briefly returned to journalism, writing an article about Canadian marijuana laws for Rolling Stone.[10]

Glass lives in Los Angeles. As of 2007, he was working as a paralegal as well as performing with a Los Angeles comedy troupe known as Un-Cabaret.[11] [12]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c Bissinger, Buzz, "Shattered Glass", Vanity Fair (1998)
  2. ^ a b Jonathan Last, "Stopping Stephen Glass", The Weekly Standard
  3. ^ http://www.cspinet.org/new/newrepb.html
  4. ^ http://www.cspinet.org/new/newreppr.html
  5. ^ http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/330txifj.asp
  6. ^ http://www.forbes.com/1998/05/11/otw3.html "Lies, damn lies and fiction"
  7. ^ NPR audio interview with Charles Lane about Glass
  8. ^ Audio commentary by Charles Lane to the 2005 DVD edition of Shattered Glass.
  9. ^ http://www.themedia.co.za/article.aspx?articleid=244011&area=/media_columnistsnet_savvy/
  10. ^ http://www.humanhemphealth.ca/Rolling_Stone_090403.html
  11. ^ http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2007/10/postscript200710
  12. ^ http://www.uncabaret.com/posse.html

[edit] Further reading

  • Glass, Stephen. The Fabulist (2003). ISBN 0-7432-2712-3
  • Very few of the articles that Glass wrote for The New Republic are still available online. Below are links to some of those articles which Glass is suspected of fabricating in part or in whole:
  1. “Mrs. Colehill Thanks God For Private Social Security”, June 1997, for Policy Review magazine. PDF format.
  2. “Probable Claus”, published January 6 & 13, 1997
  3. “Don't You D.A.R.E.”, published March 3, 1997
  4. “Writing on the Wall”, published March 24, 1997
  5. "Slavery Chic", published July 14 & 21, 1997
  6. “The Young and the Feckless”, published Sept. 15, 1997
  7. “Washington Scene: Hack Heaven”, published May 18, 1998

[edit] External links

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