Stephen Glass & Journalist Ethics


The recently released movie Shattered Glass tells the story of Stephen Glass, a young associate editor of The New Republic in the late nineties who fabricated 27 stories. Although the movie, as is to be expected, over-simplifies the story, creating composite characters and removing many of the details from what really happened, it's a fairly good re-telling of a scandalous episode in the annals of magazine journalism. But it leaves a number of questions unanswered, such as, How on earth did Glass fool so many people for so long?

Journalism's mania for truth is a relatively new phenomenon. It did not exist until about the middle of the twentieth century. H. L. Mencken, in his autobiographical Newspaper Days, admits to making up a story about a wild man running loose in the woods north of Baltimore. Far from apologizing, Mencken brags about it, saying he was proud of his fabrication. Hyperbole, exaggeration, outright lies were the common stuff of journalism in Mencken's day. Newspapers faced stiff competition and no self-respecting paper could afford to bring out dull copy, which is what happens to those papers that are anal-retentive about the truth.

The Stephen Glass scandal has occasioned its fair share of righteous indignation.There are those who see in it a cautionary tale of how dishonesty feeds on credulity. A reformed and penitent Glass has recently emerged after five years in exile. He has published a novel (for which he was paid a six figure advance) called The Fabulist, which recounts the adventures of a Washington journalist who makes up stories to win the esteem of his colleagues, just as Glass did at The New Republic.

Not everyone is buying Glass' act as a reformed liar. “He's a worm. I have no place in my heart for him any longer,” says one former colleague at TNR. “I don't mean to have a hard heart, but I think frankly that ... [his] contrition [is] a career move. I have no reason to believe otherwise.” This sort of reaction from his coworkers at TNR is understandable. After all, Glass made fools of the whole lot of them. Yet, in order to be made a fool, one must be at least a little foolish to begin with. And this is the part of the Glass fiasco that has received the least attention. Glass' editor at TNR, Charles Lane, nearly admits as much. “It was really the magazine's responsibility to ensure that the stuff went in was good journalism. And it totally failed in that respect,” confesses Lane. But he nearly takes this statement back when he adds: “The only thing I think you can say in defense of The New Republic was that we were up against somebody, at the time, who was really determined to deceive the magazine. And that is quite unusual.”

Perhaps it is quite unusual. I won't argue with that. But was it really true that TNR was up against somebody really determined to deceive the magazine? I doubt it. Glass deceptions weren't all that spectacular. Many of his sources were made up out of whole cloth. These people didn't even exist. Why didn't somebody check on them? It's not as if there were no complaints about Glass' articles before he was found out. So what explains the apathy of TNR's editors?

In a word: because Glass' articles were far and away the best stuff they had. They were very well written, full of imaginative and memorable detail. An article Glass wrote for Harper's Magazine about telephone-based fortune-telling is still available online . Although he probably made this one up as well, I doubt, given the subject, it matters. Nonetheless, it is a brilliant article — clearly superior to most of the stuff one finds in magazines. The amount of telling detail in the story is very impressive. It is also a very red flag which his editors should've noticed right off the bat. Reality isn't this colorful. At one point in the article, Glass tells us that he got a call from a psychic named Tinsel "who has been trying to unionize phone psychics with little success." Tinsel is especially concerned, we are told, about the racial imbalance of callers to psychic lines. According Tinsel's own figures, 70.2% of phone-psychic usage is by minorities and 48.3% of callers are "very poor."

As satire, this is great stuff, but how such swill ever passed a reputable editor's desk, I, for one, have difficulty fathoming. Beyond the piquant absurdity of a psychic conducting statistical research, the decimal points in the statistical figures alone should have given the game away. The indignation against Glass seems to me very much misplaced. It's not Glass alone who should've been fired for the outlandish fictions he passed off as journalism, but the editors who published the damn things.

To be sure, if it was up to me, no one would have been fired, including Glass. So what if his articles weren't true? Who really cares about the truth, anyway? Journalists can get on their high horse and talk about the virtues of fact checking and sticking to the truth, but no one buys that rot. No one wants the truth. As Mencken himself reminds us, "despite all this extravagant frenzy for the truth [in journalism], there is something in the human mind that turns instinctively to fiction, and that even the most gifted journalists succumb to it." So why rage against it? Wouldn't the world be a better place if Stephen Glass was still haunting the lairs of The New Republic, hoodwinking its editors into publishing absurdity after absurdity? I certainly think so. I'm sorry that such a delightful and talented con artist was ever found out. I only wish we can have more such journalistic scandals in the ensuing years.



Posted: Fri - January 16, 2004 at 03:09 AM          

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