Stephen Glass

BA, University of Pennsylvania

There are three ways for a journalist to write a story. In the first way, you go to where the story took place; you find out what happened and what didn’t happen; you talk to the people involved; you do research into the background of the whole thing; and then you write it up, accurately, in your own words. In the second way, you maybe go to where the story took place. You maybe find out what did and didn’t happen, and you maybe dig up some background. But you mainly avail yourself of the work of someone else who did it the first way. You copy and paste their work under your byline.

The first way has been traditionally referred to as “good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting.” The second way has been, and is, called “plagiarism.”

In the third way, you just fucking make shit up. You invent stuff that didn’t really happen. You interview fictional people via the wonders of the human imagination. Maybe you create background material, too—websites, story notes, other pseudodocumentation. Then you write it up—certainly in your own words, since no one else has ever heard of or reported on what you cobbled together in your head—and run it as fact.

This third way is called… well, various things. “Fraud.” “Lies.” “Willful deception.” “A betrayal of your publication, your colleagues, and the public.” And so on.

It is this third form of journalism that made Ivy League graduate Stephen Glass a household name—at least in households where people care about journalism—in 1998. Up until then, young Glass had had an excellent career as an editorial assistant, and then an Associate Editor, at The New Republic. In fact, Glass landed at TNR a mere year after being editor in chief of Penn’s undergrad newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian.

Not only that, he began—at age twenty-three!—to contribute to Policy Review, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and George. Jonathan Chait and Hanna Rosin, his fellow TNR interns, marveled at Glass’s talent, energy, and good luck in finding stories. Rosin writes, “While the rest of us were still scratching our way out of the intern pit, he was becoming a franchise, turning out bizarre and amazing stories week after week.” Not everyone was thrilled. Organizations about which Glass had written (e.g., the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the College Republican National Committee, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E.) took sharp issue with what they called Glass’s distortions and inaccuracies. Glass’s editors defended him vigorously.

Then, in 1998, Associate Editor Glass published a story titled “Hack Heaven,” about (scare-quote alert) “Ian Restil,” a fifteen-year-old computer whiz who hacked his way into the networks of a company called Jukt Micronics. A writer for Forbes, pissed that his magazine had been scooped, looked into it—and discovered that “Jukt Micronics,” when input into search engines, yielded not the usual 1,258,000 hits, but a big fat 0 hits. Jukt had exactly one phone line and a single tacky AOL webpage. By then, Glass’s editor, the beloved Michael Kelly, had been replaced by the less colorful, more “grown-up” Charles Lane. Lane dragged Glass to the Hyatt Hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, where supposedly Restil had met with the Jukt guys. Lane asked questions and sought confirmations. But none of it panned out.

Stephen Glass had made the whole thing up. Impressively, he’d worked overtime to sell the fraud, from concocting the fake Jukt website to printing up bogus business cards. But when Lane realized that the “Jukt executive” he had spoken with on the phone was Glass’s brother at Stanford, Lane fired Glass and ordered a review of all forty-one of the young man’s pieces. At least twenty-seven of them turned out to have been partially, if not totally, fabricated. And while it wasn’t the first or the last scandal of its kind in American journalism, it was arguably the most notorious one of the modern age.*

Bear in mind who is damaged by such behavior—because it turns out to be pretty much everybody. We, the readers, are, of course, deceived and misled. Any actual people who are written about falsely are slandered or traduced. The reputation of the publication involved is marred. And, just as bad, the fraudster’s colleagues—who have probably trusted and defended him (or her) previously—are not only personally betrayed, but are left working for an institution with damaged credibility. Their work is suddenly cast in a bad light because some other guy broke the rules. Above and beyond that, this kind of behavior undermines journalism itself, providing ammunition to those who insist that it’s all a pack of lies, when really, the lion’s share of fiction-as-journalism is confined to the media vehicles owned by Rupert Murdoch.

After Stephen Glass was chased out of journalism, he went to law school and passed the bar in both New York and California, but neither state’s bar association approved his application to practice. Today Glass works as a paralegal in the office of a Beverly Hills personal injury lawyer. He seems entirely repentant, and we’re open and forgiving enough to assume that that’s sincere.

Still, one hopes that the next time he attends Penn, the school provides a mandatory class in “Not Violating Professional Ethics in a Way You Have to Know Will Inevitably Be Discovered.”