Star reporter Stephen Glass chose to invent stories, writes Aida Edemariam, one of those he fooled
It was a sunny spring morning in New York, and I may even have been humming as I got out of the lift at Harper's magazine, which occupies the 11th floor of a nondescript building on the teeming lower reaches of Broadway. I was an assistant editor, in charge of fact-checking; it was my first job, and I was still getting over the sheer grown-upness of it all.
I stopped, abruptly, when I saw the knot of worried editors in the hallway, the publisher brandishing a copy of the Washington Post. A 25-year-old star reporter for the New Republic, Stephen Glass, had just been fired for fabricating stories, then faking websites and voicemail messages to support them. Suddenly it seemed as if I wouldn't need to be getting used to anything after all.
The trouble was, in the February 1998 issue, we had just published a piece by Glass, a colourful tale of late nights spent working as a phone psychic. It had been checked by a colleague and had passed muster, but I was set to work, rechecking. The Post's Howard Kurtz returned to the story a week later: "The New Republic has finished sifting through the journalistic wreckage left behind by Stephen Glass and the findings aren't pretty: two-thirds of the 41 stories he wrote for the magazine were at least partially fabricated. Six articles 'could be considered entirely or nearly entirely made up'."
After that, everyone else weighed in too.
A typical Glass story would be a hugely colourful, so-strange-it-must-be-true slab of Americana, and initially some people, including me, accorded him a certain grudging admiration for taking us all in so thoroughly. It reminded me of the Alan Sokal affair in 1996, in which a physicist published a well-received (and deliberately nonsensical) essay in a journal of literary theory. American journalism is full of impressive things, but it can be terribly earnest, so the occasional comeuppance is probably not a bad thing. But unlike Sokal, Glass did not gloat: after being exposed he imploded, was put on suicide watch, went to ground. It left a bad taste, and for us inexperienced fact-checkers, already the only libel gatekeepers at poorer magazines, it meant even more of a burden to prove everything absolutely true.
The story has now been made into a Tom Cruise-produced film, Shattered Glass. Harper's gets a couple of mentions, but it's mainly based in the hermetic hothouse of the New Republic, the small-circulation, contrarian publication which describes itself as the "in-flight magazine of Air Force One" (though, as Ryan Lizza, an associate editor and former colleague of Glass's recently told the New York Times: "I think the in-flight magazine of the current administration is Sports Illustrated").
Shattered Glass is detailed, subtle, utterly recognisable in the way a fly-on-the-wall documentary on your own workplace might be. There is no attempt to explain Glass; we're simply given him (in the form of Hayden Christensen) as a specimen to observe. The result is that the Icarus arc of the story, and the fundamental issue of trust betrayed, resonate beyond journalistic shop talk.
After I watched the film I went back to the Glass piece I had checked for Harper's, and six years later, it was a rather strange experience. The first thing is that Glass's story of having posed as a phone psychic, duping his callers (and his employers), is a masterclass in how to lie:
"Quick on my feet, I tell her that I use a combination of tarot and playing cards, adding comments like: 'Since the days of the pirates, the six of clubs has had a long history of predicting romantic entanglements.' " (The accretion of detail is key.) "She seems to buy it."
Glass prepares for his first test reading with "a place mat I nab from a Chinese restaurant that tells you what animal year you were born in. I am a rat, which seems particularly appropriate".
As his job progresses, he confesses that "I realised that what psychics love about being psychics is the power they have over other people . . . I am beginning to think that even if I give good advice, there is something repulsive about what I am doing."
In the New Republic piece that brought him down, there is a nonexistent software company called Jukt Micronics (to "juke" someone in American sports is to fake them out). His work is full of such feints.
The obvious question is, of course, why didn't the fact-checkers catch him? Scandals du jour Jack Kelley and Jayson Blair (and various other fantasists) worked for newspapers, USA Today and the New York Times respectively, where there is no checking, but at magazines it is established practice. In the US there was some Schadenfreude: I remember being particularly peeved when Peter Canby, head of the New Yorker's renowned checking department, told the New York Times that they "would have smoked it out very quickly".
To the British, the trade of the fact-checker has always been faintly risible. I once checked an entertaining but factually wobbly piece by a prominent British novelist; her response to my queries was an impatient "do you have a sense of humour?" In his preface to Letters from London, a series of essays he wrote for the New Yorker between 1990 and 1995, Julian Barnes combines mockery with an understanding of the point: fact-checkers "are young, unsleeping, scrupulously polite and astoundingly pertinacious. They bug you to hell and then they save your ass. They are also suspicious of generalisation and rhetorical exaggeration, and would prefer that last sentence to read: 'They bug you a quarter of the way to hell and on 17.34 per cent of occasions save your ass.' "
But Glass used to be a fact-checker, and he went to great lengths to provide the proof that fact-checkers demand. If you were asked to invent the ideal uncheckable piece, it would be 'Prophets and Losses: The Futures Market for Phone Psychics'. Yes, there are infomercials you can watch, and yes, he did have stubs that said he worked for PBN (the Psychic Believers Network). But that's about it. In the film the Glass character says "there is a hole in the fact-checking system: a big one. It is the reporter's notes". Perhaps the fact that Glass had no tapes should have been a red flag, but even then the law was on his side. Many US states have laws that say you cannot tape a conversation unless you tell the person you're talking to that you're doing it.
In the end it comes down to trust, and that is one of the things Shattered Glass does best. Glass's colleagues at the New Republic liked him; he worked hard at being liked. The magazine believed in giving youngsters a chance, and recommended him to others.
"When he came to me he had his notes, his reputation, and the well-wishes of some of the most influential journalists of our time," says Clara Jeffrey, his editor at Harper's, referring to former New Republic editor Michael Kelly, who was recently killed in Iraq and to whom the film is dedicated.
During five years in hiding, Glass trained as a lawyer and in 2003 he published a novel, The Fabulist, at which point he was interviewed on 60 Minutes. That was his first public apology; only then did he write letters to those he had duped. This was harshly received.
"What you're covering now," the New Republic's literary editor Leon Wieseltier told CBS, "is contrition as a career move."
After Shattered Glass (with which he did not cooperate) was released in the US I sent Glass a detailed, fairly unjudgmental e-mail, asking how he felt about things. Why did he do it? Was he over-extended? Was it a cry for help? His reply was nearly immediate:
dear aida, i'd like to comment just briefly. mostly, to say that i feel great remorse and regret for my lies, including those in the Harper's piece and the fact-checking process for the piece. best, steve
So I wrote back, to satisfy a bit of personal curiosity, to ask what percentage of that Harper's article he would say was true.
There was no answer.
- Guardian Service
Shattered Glass is on limited release