This is the tale of the rise and fall of Stephen Glass, a young star journalist working at The New Republic, whose eloquent articles were sought by all major magazines. His success seemed to have no end, until research form a rival magazine showed how this talented wordsmith had one large secret: he wrote fiction dressed up as fact. And he was very good at it. This is his story.
Shattered Glass
by Buzz Bissinger
At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation’s capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up—sources, quotes, whole stories—in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism.
Nothing in Charles Lane’s 15 years of journalism, not the bitter blood of Latin America, nor war in Bosnia, nor the difficult early days of his editorship of the fractious New Republic, could compare with this surreal episode. On the second Friday in May in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in the Maryland suburb of Bethesda, near Washington, nothing less than the most sustained fraud in the history of modern journalism was unravelling.
No one in Lane’s experience, no one, had affected him in the eerie manner of Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old associate editor at The New Republic and a white-hot rising star in Washington journalism. It wasn’t just the relentlessness of the young reporter. Or the utter conviction with which Glass had presented work that Lane now feared was completely fabricated. It was the ingenuity of the con, the daring with which Glass had concocted his attention-getting creations, the subtle ease with which even now, as he attempted to clear himself, the strangely gifted kid created an impromptu illusion using makeshift details he had spied in the lobby just seconds earlier—a chair, a cocktail table, smoke from a cigarette.
It all seemed increasingly bizarre to Lane, who had brought Glass to the Hyatt, the supposed setting for one of those bogus stories, to see if the young man could explain it all away somehow. What was behind Glass’s behavior? Why did he do it? Lane didn’t know then that Stephen Glass had always been good at such risky business. Exceptionally good.
He didn’t know that, in 1990, as a high-school senior in the North Shore Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Stephen Glass—a theater-lover—had served as a technical director of Stunts, a group of talented students who produced their own work. (One production involved a Washington journalist caught up in a web of conspiracy and corruption.) The yearbook pictured Glass, directing the movements of the cast through a headset. “Stephen Glass,” read the caption, “peruses the script, ready to call the scenes, sets, and props.” Not that many years later, Glass would present other elaborate orchestrations of made-up scenes and characters, this time passing them off as journalism.
During his last year in high school, Glass also participated in an activity designed to encourage rapid and inventive thinking called Adventures of the Mind. At Highland Park High—a rigorous, competitive school where it wasn’t unusual for 5 percent of the senior class to be National Merit semifinalists—Adventures of the Mind drew the “mental giants” who loved the game of designing scenarios with creative flair. They were asked to prepare a musical in 15 minutes. Or come up, rapid-fire, with clever commercial slogans. Or act out raising a chair off the ground to see if it would float. It was the perfect fodder for smart kids. “You start with an idea,” said Glass in the yearbook, “expand on that idea until it’s a reality. It makes you more aware of not only your own capabilities, but also exposes you to the different types of careers that are waiting for us after we graduate.”
Beneath the inventions of Stephen Glass there is his own story. People try to explain it now by citing the pressure he faced to perform, and it is true that he came from an environment in which there was brutal pressure to excel. Some stress the fact that Glass was working too much. And he was illogically, and even crazily, overextended. More tempting is the idea of seeing each of Glass’s articles, each act of manipulative, aggressive trickery, as a grander and more precariously improvised adventure of the mind.
The crisis had begun to escalate on that second Friday in May. Already, Lane was virtually certain that Glass was lying about the veracity of “Hack Heaven,” a story written for the May 18 issue that dealt with the phenomenon of a teenage computer hacker seeking to extort thousands of dollars from a vulnerable corporation. During the previous day, Lane had seen Glass, when confronted with questions about his story, respond not only with a barrage of faked material to support his piece but also with his own psychological weaponry. (Lane reconstructed his interactions with Glass during a six-hour taped interview for Vanity Fair in which he frequently referred to a memo that he privately kept of what took place.)
“Look, you’re not backing me up,” Glass had told Lane the night before. He had appeared wounded, almost outraged. But Glass was acting; he knew exactly what he had done. Every name, every company, virtually every single solitary detail—except Glass’s own byline—had been a product of the young man’s imagination. But there wasn’t the slightest acknowledgment. “I really feel hurt,” Lane remembers Glass telling him. “You know, Chuck, I just feel really attacked. And you’re my editor and you should be backing me up.”
He threw the 36-year-old Lane onto the defensive. Because this, after all, was Stephen Glass, the compelling wunderkind who had seeped inside the skins of editors not only at The New Republic but also at Harper’s, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones. This was the Stephen Glass who had so many different writing contracts that his income this year might well have reached $150,000 (including his $45,000 New Republic salary). This was the Stephen Glass whose stories had attracted the attention not just of Random House—his agent was trying to score a book deal—but of several screenwriters.
When unmasked, Stephen Glass was revealed as Washington journalism’s variation on Six Degrees of Separation. But before the revelation, this talented, smooth-cheeked, and painfully insecure boy had won over the world of magazines with the vigor of his youth and his equally alluring vulnerability. He had appeared, amid the self-centeredness of the capital city, as refreshingly flexible. “There are so many assholes in journalism, so many braggarts and arrogant jerks,” said Margaret Talbot, a senior editor at The New Republic who worked with Glass. “Someone comes along who appears to have talent, is self-effacing to a fault, and is sweet and solicitous.”
He was hardly the first to make up stories. Janet Cooke had done it in 1980 in a Pulitzer Prize–winning piece for The Washington Post. Nik Cohn, 21 years after the fact, blithely admitted to having made up most of the New York story that inspired the film Saturday Night Fever. More recently, Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith was fired for making up parts of her columns. But none of these journalists approached the sheer calculation of Glass’s deceptions. He is the perfect expression of his time and place: an era is cresting in Washington; it is a time when fact and fiction are blurred not only by writers eager to score but also by presidents and their attorneys, spinmeisters and special prosecutors. From one perspective, Stephen Glass was a master parodist of his city’s shifting truths.
The New Republic, after an investigation involving a substantial portion of its editorial staff, would ultimately acknowledge fabrications in 27 of the 41 bylined pieces that Glass had written for the magazine in the two-and-a-half-year period between December 1995 and May 1998. In Manhattan, John F. Kennedy Jr., editor of George, would write a personal letter to Vernon Jordan apologizing for Glass’s conjuring up two sources who had made juicy and emphatic remarks about the sexual proclivities of the presidential adviser and his boss. At Harper’s, Glass would be dismissed from his contract after a story he had written about phone psychics, which contained 13 first-name sources, could not be verified.
For those two and a half years, the Stephen Glass show played to a captivated audience; then the curtain abruptly fell. He got away with his mind games because of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if they were doing their jobs. He wasn’t, obviously, too lazy to report. He apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than mere truth offered.
source: article by Buzz Bissinger in Vanity Fair September 1998
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1998/09/bissinger199809.print
Nothing in Charles Lane’s 15 years of journalism, not the bitter blood of Latin America, nor war in Bosnia, nor the difficult early days of his editorship of the fractious New Republic, could compare with this surreal episode. On the second Friday in May in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in the Maryland suburb of Bethesda, near Washington, nothing less than the most sustained fraud in the history of modern journalism was unravelling.
No one in Lane’s experience, no one, had affected him in the eerie manner of Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old associate editor at The New Republic and a white-hot rising star in Washington journalism. It wasn’t just the relentlessness of the young reporter. Or the utter conviction with which Glass had presented work that Lane now feared was completely fabricated. It was the ingenuity of the con, the daring with which Glass had concocted his attention-getting creations, the subtle ease with which even now, as he attempted to clear himself, the strangely gifted kid created an impromptu illusion using makeshift details he had spied in the lobby just seconds earlier—a chair, a cocktail table, smoke from a cigarette.
It all seemed increasingly bizarre to Lane, who had brought Glass to the Hyatt, the supposed setting for one of those bogus stories, to see if the young man could explain it all away somehow. What was behind Glass’s behavior? Why did he do it? Lane didn’t know then that Stephen Glass had always been good at such risky business. Exceptionally good.
He didn’t know that, in 1990, as a high-school senior in the North Shore Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Stephen Glass—a theater-lover—had served as a technical director of Stunts, a group of talented students who produced their own work. (One production involved a Washington journalist caught up in a web of conspiracy and corruption.) The yearbook pictured Glass, directing the movements of the cast through a headset. “Stephen Glass,” read the caption, “peruses the script, ready to call the scenes, sets, and props.” Not that many years later, Glass would present other elaborate orchestrations of made-up scenes and characters, this time passing them off as journalism.
During his last year in high school, Glass also participated in an activity designed to encourage rapid and inventive thinking called Adventures of the Mind. At Highland Park High—a rigorous, competitive school where it wasn’t unusual for 5 percent of the senior class to be National Merit semifinalists—Adventures of the Mind drew the “mental giants” who loved the game of designing scenarios with creative flair. They were asked to prepare a musical in 15 minutes. Or come up, rapid-fire, with clever commercial slogans. Or act out raising a chair off the ground to see if it would float. It was the perfect fodder for smart kids. “You start with an idea,” said Glass in the yearbook, “expand on that idea until it’s a reality. It makes you more aware of not only your own capabilities, but also exposes you to the different types of careers that are waiting for us after we graduate.”
Beneath the inventions of Stephen Glass there is his own story. People try to explain it now by citing the pressure he faced to perform, and it is true that he came from an environment in which there was brutal pressure to excel. Some stress the fact that Glass was working too much. And he was illogically, and even crazily, overextended. More tempting is the idea of seeing each of Glass’s articles, each act of manipulative, aggressive trickery, as a grander and more precariously improvised adventure of the mind.
The crisis had begun to escalate on that second Friday in May. Already, Lane was virtually certain that Glass was lying about the veracity of “Hack Heaven,” a story written for the May 18 issue that dealt with the phenomenon of a teenage computer hacker seeking to extort thousands of dollars from a vulnerable corporation. During the previous day, Lane had seen Glass, when confronted with questions about his story, respond not only with a barrage of faked material to support his piece but also with his own psychological weaponry. (Lane reconstructed his interactions with Glass during a six-hour taped interview for Vanity Fair in which he frequently referred to a memo that he privately kept of what took place.)
“Look, you’re not backing me up,” Glass had told Lane the night before. He had appeared wounded, almost outraged. But Glass was acting; he knew exactly what he had done. Every name, every company, virtually every single solitary detail—except Glass’s own byline—had been a product of the young man’s imagination. But there wasn’t the slightest acknowledgment. “I really feel hurt,” Lane remembers Glass telling him. “You know, Chuck, I just feel really attacked. And you’re my editor and you should be backing me up.”
He threw the 36-year-old Lane onto the defensive. Because this, after all, was Stephen Glass, the compelling wunderkind who had seeped inside the skins of editors not only at The New Republic but also at Harper’s, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones. This was the Stephen Glass who had so many different writing contracts that his income this year might well have reached $150,000 (including his $45,000 New Republic salary). This was the Stephen Glass whose stories had attracted the attention not just of Random House—his agent was trying to score a book deal—but of several screenwriters.
When unmasked, Stephen Glass was revealed as Washington journalism’s variation on Six Degrees of Separation. But before the revelation, this talented, smooth-cheeked, and painfully insecure boy had won over the world of magazines with the vigor of his youth and his equally alluring vulnerability. He had appeared, amid the self-centeredness of the capital city, as refreshingly flexible. “There are so many assholes in journalism, so many braggarts and arrogant jerks,” said Margaret Talbot, a senior editor at The New Republic who worked with Glass. “Someone comes along who appears to have talent, is self-effacing to a fault, and is sweet and solicitous.”
He was hardly the first to make up stories. Janet Cooke had done it in 1980 in a Pulitzer Prize–winning piece for The Washington Post. Nik Cohn, 21 years after the fact, blithely admitted to having made up most of the New York story that inspired the film Saturday Night Fever. More recently, Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith was fired for making up parts of her columns. But none of these journalists approached the sheer calculation of Glass’s deceptions. He is the perfect expression of his time and place: an era is cresting in Washington; it is a time when fact and fiction are blurred not only by writers eager to score but also by presidents and their attorneys, spinmeisters and special prosecutors. From one perspective, Stephen Glass was a master parodist of his city’s shifting truths.
The New Republic, after an investigation involving a substantial portion of its editorial staff, would ultimately acknowledge fabrications in 27 of the 41 bylined pieces that Glass had written for the magazine in the two-and-a-half-year period between December 1995 and May 1998. In Manhattan, John F. Kennedy Jr., editor of George, would write a personal letter to Vernon Jordan apologizing for Glass’s conjuring up two sources who had made juicy and emphatic remarks about the sexual proclivities of the presidential adviser and his boss. At Harper’s, Glass would be dismissed from his contract after a story he had written about phone psychics, which contained 13 first-name sources, could not be verified.
For those two and a half years, the Stephen Glass show played to a captivated audience; then the curtain abruptly fell. He got away with his mind games because of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if they were doing their jobs. He wasn’t, obviously, too lazy to report. He apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than mere truth offered.
source: article by Buzz Bissinger in Vanity Fair September 1998
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1998/09/bissinger199809.print
