Stephen Glass
Stephen Randall Glass is a former American journalist. He worked for The New Republic from 1995 to 1998 until an internal investigation by the magazine determined the majority of stories he wrote were either partially or entirely fabricated.
Following the journalism scandal, Glass pursued a career in law. Although he earned a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center and passed the bar in New York and California, he was unable to become a licensed attorney in either state due to concerns stemming from his scandal. Glass instead found work as a paralegal at the law firm of Carpenter, Zuckerman & Rowley, serving as the director of special projects and trial team coordinator.
Glass made a brief return to writing when he fictionalized his story in his 2003 novel The Fabulist. The same year, the scandal was dramatized in the film Shattered Glass, based on a Vanity Fair article of the same name, which stars Hayden Christensen as Glass.
Journalism career
Glass grew up in a Jewish family in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, and attended Highland Park High School. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania as a University Scholar and was an executive editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. After his graduation, Glass worked for the conservative Policy Review before being hired by The New Republic in 1995 as an editorial assistant. Soon after, the 23-year-old Glass advanced to writing features. While employed full-time at TNR, he also wrote for other magazines, including George, Rolling Stone, and Harper's; he also contributed to Public Radio International's This American Life.''New Republic'' work
Glass generally enjoyed loyalty from the staff of The New Republic. But his articles often relied on unnamed or partially identified sources, and several of his pieces prompted denials from their subjects.In December 1996, the Center for Science in the Public Interest was the target of a hostile article by Glass titled "Hazardous to Your Mental Health". CSPI wrote a letter to the editor and issued a press release pointing out numerous inaccuracies and distortions and hinting at possible plagiarism. The organization Drug Abuse Resistance Education accused Glass of falsehoods in his March 1997 article, "Don't You D.A.R.E." In May 1997, Joe Galli of the College Republican National Committee accused Glass of fabrications in "Spring Breakdown", his lurid tale of drinking and debauchery at the 1997 Conservative Political Action Conference. A June 1997 article, titled "Peddling Poppy", about a Hofstra University conference on George H. W. Bush drew a letter from Hofstra reciting errors in the story.
Through these allegations, The New Republic generally defended Glass; editor Michael Kelly even demanded that CSPI apologize to Glass. Still, the magazine's majority owner and editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, later stated that his wife had informed him that she did not find Glass's stories credible and had stopped reading them. Journalist Jonathan V. Last criticised the length of time taken to discover Glass' falsifications.
Exposure
In the May 18, 1998, issue, The New Republic published a story by Glass titled "Hack Heaven", purportedly telling the story of a 15-year-old hacker who had penetrated a company's computer network, then been hired by that company as a security consultant. The article opened as follows,Adam Penenberg, a reporter with Forbes magazine, endeavored to fact-check the piece, in part to explain how "Forbes Digital had been scooped by a weekly political publication." Beyond Glass's story, Penenberg found no search results for "Jukt Micronics", and, when he made an inquiry to the California Franchise Tax Board, the tax board reported back that no such company had ever paid taxes. Penenberg also found that several other claims Glass made in the article appeared to be false. Glass claimed that law enforcement officials in Nevada ran articles pleading with companies not to hire hackers. Still, Bob Harmon, Public Information Officer for the Nevada State Attorney General's Office, stated that no such ads were run. Glass claimed that 21 states were considering a "Uniform Computer Security Act", which would "criminalize immunity deals between hackers and companies." Still, law enforcement officials and the National Conference of Commissions on Uniform State Laws were unaware of any such proposed legislation. Glass claimed that there had been a computer-hacker conference in Bethesda, Maryland, sponsored by the "National Assembly of Hackers", but the Forbes team "could not unearth a single hacker who had even heard of this outfit, let alone attended the conference."
On Friday, May 8, 1998, Forbes presented its full findings to Charles Lane, the lead editor of The New Republic. Lane had, to that point, been unaware of potential issues with the article. Lane had Glass take him to a Hyatt Regency Hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, where Glass had claimed the computer-hacker convention occurred. He found that the hotel's layout did not match the story's description; the building in which the piece said the event took place had not been open on the supposed day of the conference, and the restaurant where the hackers supposedly had a dinner banquet afterward closed in the mid-afternoon. Lane dialed a Palo Alto number provided by Glass and spoke with a man who identified himself as a Jukt executive; when he realized that the "executive" was actually Glass's brother, he fired Glass.
Lane later said:
Aftermath
The New Republic subsequently determined that at least 27 of the 41 articles Glass wrote for the magazine contained fabricated material. Some of the 27, such as "Don't You D.A.R.E.", contained real reporting interwoven with fabricated quotations and incidents, while others, including "Hack Heaven", were completely made up. In the process of creating the "Hack Heaven" article, Glass had gone to especially elaborate lengths to thwart the discovery of his deception by TNR fact checkers: creating a website and voice mail account for Jukt Micronics; fabricating notes of story gathering; having fake business cards printed; and even composing editions of a fake computer hacker community newsletter.As for the balance of the 41 stories, Lane, in an interview given for the 2005 DVD edition of Shattered Glass, said, "In fact, I'd bet lots of the stuff in those other 14 is fake too.... It's not like we're vouching for those 14, that they're true. They're probably not either". Rolling Stone, George, and Harper's also re-examined his contributions. Rolling Stone and Harper's found the material to be generally accurate, yet they maintained that they had no way of verifying the information because Glass had cited anonymous sources. George discovered that at least three of the stories Glass wrote for it contained fabrications. Glass fabricated quotations in a profile piece and apologized to the article's subject, Vernon Jordan, an adviser to Bill Clinton during his presidency. A court filing for Glass's application to the California bar provided an updated count of his journalism career: 36 of his stories at The New Republic were reported to be fabricated in part or in whole, along with three articles for George, two articles for Rolling Stone, and one for Policy Review. Glass also later wrote a letter admitting that he had fabricated the article he wrote for Harper's, and the company retracted the story.
Glass had contributed a story to an October 1997 episode of the NPR program This American Life about an internship at George Washington's former plantation and another to a December 1997 episode about the time he spent as a telephone psychic. The program subsequently removed both segments from the Archives section of its website "because of questions about truthfulness".
In 2003, Glass briefly returned to journalism, writing an article about Canadian marijuana laws for Rolling Stone. On November 7, 2003, Glass participated in a panel discussion on journalistic ethics at George Washington University, alongside the editor who had hired him at The New Republic, Andrew Sullivan, who accused Glass of being a "serial liar" who was using "contrition as a career move."
Depiction in other media
In 2003, Glass published a fictionalized account of his time at The New Republic, the "biographical novel", The Fabulist. Glass sat for an interview with the weekly news program 60 Minutes timed to coincide with the release of his book. The New Republic literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, complained, "The creep is doing it again. Even when it comes to reckoning with his own sins, he is still incapable of nonfiction. The careerism of his repentance is repulsively consistent with the careerism of his crimes". One reviewer of The Fabulist commented, "The irony—we must have irony in a tale this tawdry—is that Mr. Glass is abundantly talented. He's funny and fluent and daring. In a parallel universe, I could imagine him becoming a perfectly respectable novelist—a prize-winner, perhaps, with a bit of luck".A film about the scandal, Shattered Glass, was released in October 2003 and depicted a stylized view of Glass's rise and fall at The New Republic. Written and directed by Billy Ray, the film stars Hayden Christensen as Glass, Peter Sarsgaard as Charles Lane, Hank Azaria as Michael Kelly, and Steve Zahn as Adam Penenberg. The film, appearing shortly after The New York Times suffered a similar plagiarism scandal with the discovery of Jayson Blair's fabrications, occasioned critiques of journalism by nationally prominent journalists such as Frank Rich and Mark Bowden.