Through a Glass Darkly

by Kaa Byington

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 a lifetime subscription to Playboy. . . Show me the money! Show me the money!"

So began a vintage Stephen Glass piece in the May 18th New Republic. Glass, who specialized in reporting on the quirky and the colorful in American life, went on to explain that executives from Jukt Micronics went to Restil's home to hire him after he hacked into their computers and posted every employee's salary, as well as pictures of naked women.

Other Glass stories have told of the Wall Street bond trading firm that set up a shrine to Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, a memorabilia convention where a condom named for Monica Lewinski was being sold, a Texas drug-testing lab that encouraged employees to send in "a few hairs" and $115 to learn if the boss was using drugs, and "Truth in Science, a Christian organization skeptical of Global warming."

Writer's Dream

Stephen Glass was living a writer's dream. Editor of the school paper at Penn, in 1995, at age 22, he'd landed an internship at the prestigious New Republic and quickly became head of the fact-checking department. Soon he was an associate editor, and by May of this year had written scores of articles for NR, and had freelance credits in Harpers, Rolling Stone, George, and Washington Post Outlook, and had contracts for more. He had a resume to die for and a future that seemed unlimited.

Unlimited, that is, until an editor at Forbes Toolbox Online magazine smelled a rat in the Ian Restil story. He'd done many hacker stories himself. He couldn't find Jukt Micronics anywhere, and nothing else in the story checked out.
[See http://www.forbes.com/asp/redir.asp?/tool/html/98/may/0511/otw.htm]

The Forbes editor called New Republic editor Charles Lane, who confronted Glass. Glass finally confessed that he had made it all up, including a web site for Jukt Micronics and a voice mail number -- which turned out to be his brother's cell phone.

Glass was fired and NR began checking all his articles in depth. Six of Glass's articles were totally fabricated, and 21 others contained "manufactured material." All were retracted, and removed from the online version of the magazine. (The only sample of Glass's writing a search turned up was a Washington Post article from 1995.) The Post believes it is accurate except for a quote which seems to have been fabricated.
[See http://wp6.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/frompost/may98/sidebars/glass13.htm]

Firestorm in the Press

Magazines that had published his pieces began checking and canceling contracts with Glass. There was a mini-firestorm in the press, a flurry of soul-searching, called second only to the scandal that embarrassed the Washington Post when a series by Janet Cooke turned out to be fabricated -- after it won the Pulitzer prize. Other publications began checking their own writers more closely and at least one writer, a columnist at the Boston Globe, has resigned.

So how did Glass get his work past all those experienced editors? Every reputable magazine has fact-checkers, who check everything from spelling to quotes to descriptions of settings. The New Yorker, once described as "the Vatican of fact-checking," has 16 of them. New Republic, like other magazines, required that a writer turn over all notes and sources for each article to the fact- checkers. Glass, having once been head of NR's fact-checking department, knew the system, and manufactured his notes and sources, including web sites and faxes. A frequent notation of his was: "This source is very nervous and asks that you not call him back." But, said his editors, the fact-checking wasn't really the problem. The problem was, they explained, that they liked him and they trusted him.

Glass was one of a small group of young writers "who are skipping the bush leagues and jumping straight to the majors." They have attitude. They write hot copy.

"Glass was part of a symbiotic culture in which prestigious but unprofitable Washington magazines hire reporters for modest pay and encourage them to moonlight for affluent New York magazines. The Manhattan glossies gain entree to the capital without having to pay full-time salaries," explains Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post.
http://wp6.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/frompost/may98/media13.htm

On Top of the World

Glass was paid $45,000 a year by The New Republic, but could pick up fifteen or twenty thousand dollars for a single long piece as a freelancer. He was on top of the world. But his friends had warned him that he was overcommitted. In addition, at his parents' insistence, he had enrolled in Georgetown Law School, adding to his overload. Was all this why he fabricated his articles? No one knows. Glass is incommunicado at his parents' home in a Chicago suburb. His friends are shocked and brokenhearted. "He was the sweetest guy imaginable," said one editor. Where does he go from here? Impossible to guess. His predecessor in scandal, Janet Cooke, hasn't been heard from since 1981, except for a brief sighting recently: http://204.27.188.70/daily/06-96/06-05-96/c04li109.htm

Why does it matter, anyway? Doesn't everybody fudge a little? Didn't we all make up footnotes in college, fake a quote or two? Exaggerate a bit on that resume? And isn't there a very fine line between fact and fiction? If an Ian Restil didn't hack into the computer of a company named Jukt, somewhere someone very like him did. Aren't Glass's untruths just harmless entertainment? What difference does it make?

At this moment it makes a very big one. There is a crisis of confidence in the media. Even such staid publications as the New York Times have participated in making a circus of the White House scandals. Traditional journalistic checks -- such as requiring two independent sources -- have been replaced by reportage of rumors and leaks. An Internet "journalist" operating out of his apartment, Matt Drudge, has rocketed to fame and fortune (he now has a TV show) reporting on rumor and innuendo. He cheerfully estimates his own accuracy as 80% and seems oblivious to the dangers of libel and invasion of privacy that drive magazines like The New Yorker to have 16 fact- checkers. A survey showed that in 1994, 35% of Americans believed that news organizations were inaccurate, but by 1997 that figure had risen to nearly 60%.

In addition, as Tanya Zamorsky reported in The Author's Guild Bulletin, the public's disdain for the media is taking the form of record-breaking libel awards by juries. The Wall Street Journal had the unhappy honor of being socked with the largest libel award in history for an article the jury found "false and defamatory" -- $227 million. Before that, the next largest award was $58 million. Statistics showed that more cases were being brought, that the success rate for media defendants was falling lower and lower, and that awards, particularly punitive damages, were skyrocketing. Clearly these juries were sending messages to the press.

No Favors

Stephen Glass did the press no favors, obviously. If the best and the brightest are making up the facts, where do we turn to get the news, to learn what is going on in the world, to be good neighbors, good consumers, good citizens? There is no alternative to a free press. Thomas Jefferson said: "The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

And on another level, what Stephen Glass did was doubly wrong. He wrote untruths, which is bad enough. But he did worse. Anybody can lie, but Glass was brilliant and talented, and he used these gifts to write really convincing lies. He betrayed not only himself, but all writers who believe that truth, the whole truth, is the only standard a free people can live by.

For more on Stephen Glass and the press, see Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/12279.html

For the press on the press, see Columbia Journalism Review.
http://www.cjr.org

-- KB
(copyright 1998 Kaa Byington)