Stephen Glass’s glittering career in journalism took off at The Daily Pennsylvanian and crash-landed when he was discovered to have fabricated dozens of articles for national magazines. Did this talent for invention color his work at Penn?
By Samuel Hughes | Illustration by Brad Yeo
Sidebar | Spinning Glass
“I have to get this off my chest,” wrote Stephen Glass, C’94. “I have a confession to make. During my tenure as Executive Editor of this newspaper, I have allowed a grave omission to occur.”
A tantalizing lead for his farewell “Enemy of the People” column in The Daily Pennsylvanian. Five years later, the reader is intrigued: What awful sin was this now-infamous alumnus going to cough up? Could it be that — even back then — he had spun quotes and characters from whole cloth and was about to admit it?
Well, not exactly. The “grave omission” was that he hadn’t publicly praised his own staff, the scores of students who worked under him, “laboring to all hours in the night in their idealistic quest for truth, justice, and the American way.” A little fulsome, maybe — the DP was rather full of itself that year, especially after stolen newspapers and Water Buffaloes catapulted it onto the national stage — but a nice gesture. No wonder his staff adored him.
As that farewell column continued, Glass began spinning an image that is somewhat more remarkable in hindsight than it was at the time: that of a looking glass, a mirror of the University itself, which the DP’s staffers “slave in this office for hours on end to construct.” And it was that mirror’s reflection, he wrote, “that allows members of the University to be self-critical and strive for excellence.”
Then there was this: “This mirror is not and should not be ‘nice.’ Rather, this reflection is more useful when the glass is pure — emphasizing each wrinkle and each scar. Only by seeing our true self will we ever improve.”
“It is a quiet, brutal war,” says a Hard at the University of Pennsylvania, who asked that his name not be used since many of his colleagues are Sensors. “For [Sensors, successories] is a church, and these posters are the idols. They have to convert you to it.”
— From “Writing on the Wall,” by Stephen Glass, in the March 24, 1997, New Republic.
You might not have known about the bitter nationwide struggle between the Sensors — fanatical followers of uplifting messages known as “successories” — and the Hards, described as non-believing “academics and irritated employees.” And even though it was being fought out right here at Penn, among other places, you were in good company. Outside of Stephen Glass’s mind, it seems, most of those warriors didn’t exist. “There’s no way of verifying whether that’s an honest quote or not,” says Tyce Palmaffy, an editorial assistant at TheNew Republic, about the Hard line from Penn.”It’s anonymous. But some of the material was definitely made up, and that one is indicative of his process of deceit.”
By now, a good portion of the Western world has heard about Glass, the shooting star who was found to have pulled off one of the most amazing journalistic con jobs in history. He was unmasked in May, confronted with incontrovertible evidence that he had been fabricating quotes and people and organizations in his stories, submitting notes from nonexistent interviews to fact-checkers, even constructing a faux Web site to throw off the reporters and editors who were closing in on him. At age 25, he was fired from his job as associate editor of The New Republic, and his freelance contracts with George, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s were cancelled. Today, readers hoping to find the fabricated stories at The New Republic‘sWeb site are met with an apology and an explanation of why those stories — more than two dozen of them — are no longer there. (“Mr. Glass’s work was dishonest in any medium — paper or electronic — and here in cyberspace, just as in the magazine, we regret its publication.”) Now there are Web sites with titles like A Tissue of Lies: the Stephen Glass Index cataloguing his inventions and the media commentary — of which there has been truckloads, including lengthy features in recent issues of Vanity Fair and Philadelphia magazine by DP alums Buzz Bissinger, C’76, and Sabrina Rubin, C’94.
So what happened? What could have transformed the likeable, talented, high-minded young editor who was constantly asking people “Are you mad at me?” into a spinner of mendacious and increasingly whacked-out yarns about churches whose members believed that George Bush was the reincarnation of Christ and shopping-mall Santas whose fear of child-molestation suits led to a Union of Concerned Santas and Easter Bunnies? Not to mention less amusing brands of plagiarism and invention, one of which prompted George editor John F. Kennedy, Jr., to send a letter to Vernon Jordan, apologizing for a Glass-spun quote about Jordan’s sexual preferences.
Theories abound (see sidebar), many of them plausible, some of them fascinating, all of them insufficient. In the end, no one really knows what happened except Glass himself, now a reclusive law student at Georgetown University, where he recently qualified for the Law Review, but for “personal reasons” declined to participate. And so far, he has maintained a deafening silence.
“Stephen I don’t think is going to be able to talk to you, for a couple of reasons,” said his Washington attorney, Gerson Zweifach. “One is that it’s much too soon for him to feel comfortable speaking publicly about this. The other is that there are some pending legal matters that make it much more complicated for him to discuss the events of the last year.” (Glass is being sued by the anti-drug group DARE over one of his New Republic pieces.)
It’s a sad story; a tragedy, really. Having led the DP through turbulent waters with high-profile panache and gone on to become a rising star in the high-octane world of Washington journalism, he was seen as a success story and even a role model; his fall stunned his former colleagues and friends at the DP and throughout the University. For most, the natural inclination to conduct caustic post-mortems was tempered by a real sadness and desire to defend him — and to assure outsiders that what happened recently had no bearing on his work at the DP.
“If you talk to anyone who was there at the same time as him, I don’t think you’ll find anyone at the paper who questioned his ethics or integrity at all,” says Charlie Ornstein, C’96, who worked under Glass as a reporter and later became executive editor himself. “To the contrary, among the people who he trained and supervised, there was a real sense of admiration and a real sense that he was trying to instill values. And I think that was part of the reason everyone is so surprised.”
“When this thing first broke,” says Philadelphia magazine editor Eliot Kaplan, C’78, “I was hoping that he would hold a press conference and say, ‘I’ve been secretly doing a book on how easy it is to fool the mainstream press, and now my book will be out next year.’ But that didn’t happen.
“I feel very badly for him,” adds Kaplan, who had tried to hire Glass on more than one occasion. “I hate to see somebody go through that kind of breakdown. My first thought is still, ‘What a horrible waste.’ As angry as I am, and as betrayed as I feel, my primary response is still one of great sympathy. That such a talented guy is going to fall by the wayside.”
Not everyone responds with such compassion. For Bissinger, the more he dug into the story, the angrier he became.
“Whatever the reason, it suggests the complete absence of any moral center whatsoever,” he says with palpable disdain. “In the end, Stephen screwed everybody — his closest friends, people who helped him, people who liked him. He dishonored Penn, he dishonored The Daily Pennsylvanian, he dishonored The New Republic. He did a tremendous amount of damage to journalism. But maybe in a way that’s good, because I think he tore the lid off a lot of the problems that are in the journalism profession. This whole blurring of what’s real and what’s imagined.”
On the fourth floor of Washington’s Omni Shoreham Hotel, eight young men sit facing each other on the edge of a pair of beds. They are all 20 or 21 and are enrolled in Midwestern colleges … The minibar is open and empty little bottles of booze are scattered on the carpet. On the bed, a Gideon Bible, used earlier in the night to resolve an argument, is open to Exodus … The young men pass around a joint, counterclockwise. “I’m telling you, I’m telling you, we don’t know what we’re doing,” says Jason, a brown-haired freckled boy from Iowa, between puffs. “We’ve got no mission. We’ve got no direction. Conservatives — we’re like a guy who has to pee lost in the desert, searching for a tree.” The other seven young men nod and mumble in agreement …
This is the face of young conservativism in 1997: pissed off and pissed: dejected, depressed, drunk and dumb …
— From “Spring Breakdown,” by Stephen Glass, in the March 31, 1997, New Republic.
Dr. Alan Charles Kors, professor of history, recalls reading that piece with some misgivings. A conservative libertarian himself, he had been sufficiently impressed by Glass during his days as editor of the DP to recommend him for his first job at the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review, even though the Heritage Foundation isa conservative institution and Glass was, on many issues, a liberal. But Kors put his doubts aside. “I said to myself, ‘Yeah, but it’s Stephen who wrote it, so it must have happened that way.'”
It didn’t.
After the article appeared, an old DP colleague, Gabriele Marcotti, C’95, called Glass in Washington to talk about it. “One of the things that struck me at the time,” says Marcotti, “was how he got very excited about it. He regaled me with all these anecdotes, some of which were in the story, some of which hadn’t appeared in the piece. Looking back, if you’re going to make something up and write it and get away with it — at that point, unless you believed your own bullshit, you’d probably let it lie. You wouldn’t go and try to impress somebody again with more anecdotes about it. I think that was an obvious sign that he was under a lot of stress. He needed help at that point, because it wasn’t just a case of ‘I can’t cut it, so I’ll stretch the truth.’ It was a case of alternate reality.”
Johnnie is the leader of his ‘posse,’ a club of several dozen homeless people that has its own intricate rules and traditions. All members of the club identify their allegiance by donning an American Heart Association button and a Zenith Data Systems painters’ cap … Club members enjoy citing their hero, Kenny Rogers, as best expressing the philosophy of surviving on the streets. Twice that day June and Johnnie sang “The Gambler” in chorus …
— From “A Day on the Streets,” by Stephen Glass, in theJune 6, 1991, Summer Pennsylvanian.
Since no one has proven otherwise, it’s always possible that this story is completely accurate, right down to the first-person descriptions of homeless people smoking crack and picking up prostitutes and talking about murders they committed. There’s no question that there really was a West Philadelphia homeless man named Johnnie who used to hassle Glass for money — “like Steve owed him,” recalls Matt Selman, C’93 — and whose photo accompanied the story. And Glass’s roommate that year, Joon Chong, C’94, remembers him being away from the room for a day or two while he was working on the article. But the notion of a homeless “club” with matching buttons and caps seems prima facie absurd. Kenny Rogers seems a rather unlikely hero for African-American homeless men. And the very idea of the neurotic, khaki-clad Glass hanging out in a West Philly crackhouse struck some of his colleagues as preposterous — though at the time, they kept their mouths shut. After all, says one, he was a person that “strange things happened to.”
Later, Gabe Marcotti, who had done some work in outreach programs and once scored some crack for a story himself, talked with Glass about his “day on the streets.” A number of things about it simply did not ring true. “It struck me as really, really unlikely,” he says. “He was the most white-bread, preppy person you can imagine.”
But while Marcotti didn’t really believe Glass’s story, he admits that he wanted to. “You sort of got the sense when you spoke to him that everything he told you, you wanted to believe him. When I heard the news about what happened to him, just talking to friends, a lot of us came to the conclusion that he had so many other things going for him, and so many people looked up to him, that you always wanted to believe him — and were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
The DP can be a very demanding master: reporters regularly log 30 to 40 hours a week there, while top editors often put in 50 to 60 — a grueling load for a full-time student. In the words of Matt Klein, C’93, who preceded Glass as executive editor, it “weeds out weak-minded people.” For all its self-importance (these are college kids, after all), it has long been regarded as one of the best college newspapers in the country, with the awards to back it up.
It also inspires fierce loyalty — you have to be deeply devoted, and maybe a little nuts, to work that hard for free. Staffers talk about the “DP culture” that separates the truly devoted, fast-track insiders from those on staff whose entire lives do not revolve around the paper. Insiders tend to come from very similar, affluent backgrounds; anyone in a work-study program, for example, is unlikely to have the time to get deeply involved. “The DP, like any newspaper, doesn’t reflect the student body; it reflects the people who make it up,” says Marcotti. Glass, by all accounts, was an insider from the get-go who loved the paper and was one of its most enthusiastic cheerleaders.
Though not known as a great writer, he was considered a very good reporter: quick on his feet, energetic and resourceful, able to cover complex issues, ask the right questions, find the right people to talk to — and chat them up. Some of the subjects of his stories and editorial coverage remember him as fair and pleasant to work with; others still seethe about what they saw as deeply biased coverage.
Matt Klein says that while Glass was a “solid” writer and reporter, his rise through the ranks was based to some extent on a “cult of personality.” Glass, he says, “had worked the hardest, put in the most hours, and was a good leader. He was someone people respected, trusted, and liked.”
Sabrina Rubin, who says she and the rest of the editorial board “adored” him, puts it another way: “There are reporters who get ahead because they’re great schmoozers, and I think Steve was definitely one of them.” When he became the paper’s executive editor, the editorial board hailed him as a “man of principle,” and in her Philadelphia magazine piece, Rubin describes how Glass threw a righteous fit when she and a colleague concocted a funny and obviously made-up travel story for 34th Street — going so far as to call an emergency session of the DP’s Alumni Association board to apprise them of the transgression. (Rubin also acknowledges that she felt “terrible” about writing a fairly dishy article about someone she had once liked and admired. “Actually, Eliot [Kaplan] had to force me to do it,” she says. “I didn’t want to do it at all.”)
“The DP at times has been a confluence of very talented people and very interesting events,” says former editorial-page editor Ken Baer, C’94, now a speechwriter for U.S. Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey. “And Steve was an editor at one of those moments: 1993 was a big year for Penn. [Former President] Sheldon Hackney was leaving; the provost was leaving; there was the Water Buffalo case, the theft of the newspapers — and all of that came together at this one massive year. I feel fortunate that we had a very able staff working on it, and I feel fortunate that Steve Glass was the editor and was leading us at that time. I don’t feel that anything that happens [now] should reflect on what happened then. No one should ever look back and say, ‘What was going on there?'”
Dr. Sheldon Hackney, Hon’93, who returned to Penn last year as a professor of history after four years at the helm of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is not particularly eager to revisit that confluence of events and people. But he has obviously thought about it a good deal, and when he finally agrees to talk, he does so thoughtfully and at some length. (At the end of the interview he also tells me, quite cordially, that he hopes this article never runs.)
“Journalists are basically telling a story,” he says, sitting in his sunny office in the history department’s temporary warren at 3401 Walnut St. “They’re not just telling you what happened. They’re arranging those facts and trying to fit them into a story that is recognizable by the public, and it’s a story that has conflict and good guys and bad guys — a narrative, if you will. And if the narrative doesn’t exist, then you have to sort of suggest one, and you rearrange things so that there are narrative elements to it. Otherwise it really isn’t very interesting.
“What Glass was good at, of course, was finding those quotations and human beings who somehow embodied the meaning of the story, who carried the narrative impact of the story. And he was rewarded for that — quite handsomely. Since the rewards are so great, and people pat you on the back and say, ‘That’s a great piece,’ the temptations for making sure the next piece is just as good or better must be tremendous.” He smiles; a smile of many meanings. “This is an understanding of the press that I achieved through hard knocks,” he adds.
“Now, he didn’t invent the Water Buffalo incident. He didn’t invent the theft of the newspapers. But his coverage I remember as being really over the top. That clearly was shaped by him, and in inventive ways, to portray the story that he wanted to portray. Which was the story, I think, of the DP as the defender of moral virtue and free speech being oppressed by the storm troopers of thought-control, epitomized by the president of the University. So every time there is a chance to shape the coloration of the story in that direction by inventing quotations or changing them a bit, and in the way the story was played — I wouldn’t be surprised if he was doing that.”
Just recently, he mentions, he and Linda Hyatt, a former senior member of his staff, had been reminiscing about Glass and his coverage of those incidents. “She remembers his quoting me on occasion, and she would ask me why I said what I did, and I didn’t have any remembrance of even talking to Stephen Glass. So it sounds as if he was embroidering.”
This is strong stuff, though it hardly constitutes a smoking gun. I call Hyatt, now president of the Landmark Foundation in Norfolk, Va.
“I can’t remember specific quotes,” she acknowledges, “but I can certainly remember saying to Sheldon, ‘Did you say that?’ And he said to me, ‘No, I didn’t say that.’ Well, no one in the office said it. Where is this stuff coming from? We were quite puzzled by it. And there were a lot of incidents when I called Steve and asked about these stories when quotes appeared attributed to Sheldon, and he didn’t return my phone calls.”
No one denies that both free speech and diversity are fundamental values to the University’s academic mission. But in his so-called effort to “balance” the two ideals, Hackney has betrayed both.
When it comes to values, Dr. Hackney, there can be no compromise …
I have had less than 17 hours of sleep in the past four days. In the same half-week, I have logged over 50 hours of phone time with the media, attorneys, civil rights groups, and our readers. And I have spent almost that amount of time arguing with University administrators who perpetuate Hackney’s unjust compromise of values.
In the past four days, I have been betrayed — and so have you.
— From Hackney’s betrayal, op-ed piece by Stephen Glass in the April 20, 1993, Daily Pennsylvanian.
This one is not a fabrication. Depending on your viewpoint, it is either an impassioned and eloquent defense of free speech under assault by would-be censors or a biased, self-righteous attack on a free-speech defender who was trying to keep an already tense campus calm. Glass wrote it several days after a group of students who came to call themselves “The Working Committee of Concerned Black and Latino Students” seized virtually the entire press run of the DP and deposited it into dumpsters. They were, they said, protesting the “blatant and covert racism” at Penn and, especially, in the DP. Not surprisingly, Glass was furious. In his opinion, which arguably helped shape the national debate, Hackney had not condemned the protesters strongly enough.
“One thing if I could do it over again is to write the statement that I released a bit stronger and more clearly,” says Hackney. “But it does say, the famous sentence, ‘Here we have two University values in conflict, open expression and tolerance,’ something to that effect. That’s what The Wall Street Journal picks up, and says, ‘Here’s this namby-pamby president who says, “We have two values in conflict.”‘ Well, the very next sentence in that statement says, ‘At a university, it’s clear which value must take precedence. It’s open expression.’ Well, they never mentioned that. So there — I’ve always wondered why — I think Stephen Glass and the DP had a role in reinforcing that version of the story.”
Actually, what the statement said was: “There can be no compromise regarding the First Amendment right of an independent publication to express whatever views it chooses,” followed by: “At the same time, there can be no ignoring the pain that expression may cause.” And in the same April 20 Almanac in which that statement appeared,Hackney added: “Though I understand that those involved in last week’s protest against the DP may have thought they were exercising their own rights of free expression, I want to make it clear that neither I nor the University of Pennsylvania condone the confiscation of issues of The Daily Pennsylvanian.” Right below that, Hackney had pointed out that the University policy he had promulgated in 1989 specifically banned such actions and warned that “members of the University community who are responsible for confiscating publications should expect to be held accountable.”
Glass and the DP were not assuaged.
“I’ve always wondered why they did not take the other option open to them,” says Hackney, “which was to say, ‘We won! The president is for it, free speech is upheld, we’re victorious, let’s get on with it.’ But they didn’t. They chose instead to go with, to reinforce what I think is an erroneous right-wing picture of the University of being totally under the control of left-wing radicals who have no respect for truth, who don’t even believe it exists, who think that their job is to indoctrinate students rather than teach the truth and to enable students to learn.”
Most members of the DP felt that Glass not only reacted appropriately to what they saw as a blatant attempt at censorship but that he handled the high-pressure situation with poise. “Steve really distinguished himself as a true leader,” says Rubin. “The rest of us were basically in a panic — when we found out that the entire press run had been stolen and thrown away, we felt like we were under attack, and we didn’t understand the reasons why. Steve originally thought the people who had done it should be prosecuted and all the other stuff, but then he cooled down and he calmed everybody else down. And he had a little talk with [editorial-page editor] Kenny Baer, and he said, ‘Everything’s got to come through me; we can’t have everybody else talking; I’ll be the spokesman.’ Whenever he was quoted in all these different magazines, whatever he’d say, he could talk in sound bites. He knew exactly how to handle the situation — he knew people really well.”
Well, most of the time. On Alumni Day that year, he did make the mistake of trying to hand a copy of the DP’s annual graduation issue to Alvin Shoemaker, W’60, Hon’95, then chairman of Penn’s board of trustees. The issue recapped the year’s leading stories — including the Water Buffalo incident, the theft of the DP’s, and a number of other not-so-rosy incidents, none of which reflected particularly well on the University. Shoemaker, who was trying to raise money for various projects and found the paper’s coverage infuriatingly one-sided, told Glass in very blunt language just where he could stick his newspaper. No need to ask “Are you mad at me?” this time.
Marcotti was one member of the DP staff who thought Glass had blown the DP-theft story out of proportion. “I disagreed with him deeply on that issue, on the confrontational tone,” he says. “I still believed that the [trashing of the papers] was a form of free expression, not censorship. This did not endear me to the DP mainstream.”
But some months later, he had dinner with Glass, whose term was soon to expire. They ended up talking about free speech and the trashing of the newspapers until the small hours of the morning. “This is one of the reasons why I genuinely liked the guy — and still do, in spite of everything — because he took all this time to try to persuade me to his point of view, and he had no reason to. Even situations where I disagreed with him, I would come out of talking with him, while maintaining my viewpoint, recharged. He was so charismatic and energetic. And I would go and I’d work my ass off for the DP. He really was a natural leader, and he had this power to really inspire people to go above and beyond what they would normally do. Even people who shared nothing with him in terms of goals and ideas.”
Buzz Bissinger wonders how deeply Glass really believed in his free-speech rhetoric. “It seems to me that those are values that, if you believe in them, you believe in them your whole life. You don’t turn them on; you don’t turn them off. Certainly, later in his life, Stephen had no problem turning off the values of truth. So you have to wonder how much did he really, really believe in it when he was in college — or to what degree did he think, ‘Hey, this is a way to get some fame for myself’? You know, a lot of people around the country had heard of him. George Will was writing about him, and Nat Hentoff was writing about him. I mean, a lot of big names were writing about him. And I’m sure it made him feel good.
“I don’t want to insult anyone who writes for a college newspaper,” Bissinger adds, “but a college newspaper is not a reflection of anything. And I’m saying that as someone who worked at The Daily Pennsylvanian, and it was a wonderful sort of seminal experience — but it’s not the same.”
Which leads to the inevitable question of how Glass, with such limited real-world experience as a journalist under his belt, got to such a lofty position by the age of 24.
“I’ve spent 20 years as a journalist,” says Bissinger, “and I’ve spent those years in places that were not very sexy, like Norfolk, Virginia or St. Paul, Minnesota. But they taught me a hell of a lot about journalism. Regardless of how good or how bad a reporter or journalist Stephen was, how did he get to this level so quickly? When I was 24 or 25 years old, I was covering cops. And I’m glad that I did it, because Stephen never knew what it was like for someone to get in his face and say, ‘You know what, that story was wrong, that story was inaccurate.’ When you work at a relatively small newspaper, if you print one fact wrong, they are all over you, and they are all over your editor. It’s an incredibly unpleasant experience, and for no other reason, you never want to go through it again.”
It was “Hack Heaven” — a story about a bratty teenage computer hacker who was blackmailing software companies that appeared in the May 18, 1998, New Republic — which led to Glass’s unmasking as a writer of fiction posing as a journalist. (And not a very good fiction-writer, either; the dialogue in that piece is ludicrous.) The former fact-checker was exposed by an online journalist from Forbes Digital Tool named Adam Penenberg, who couldn’t figure out why he had never heard of “Jukt Micronics” and why Jukt’s Web site (which featured a “rebuttal” of “Hack Heaven”) was so blatantly amateurish.
“I am sure Glass would have been caught eventually,” says Penenberg. “Usually when Glass faked a piece, he would use first names, or rely on anonymous sources and fabricated notes to fool editors and fact-checkers. But with ‘Hack Heaven,’ perhaps we were seeing the beginning of the end. He actually provided first and last names, a government agency and a law, a convention he wrote had occurred in Bethesda, Md. He was becoming careless. Perhaps he wanted to get caught.”
Postscript: Last month, the DP‘s Alumni Association board met in Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall before its annual Steven A. Marquez Journalism Conference, put on by alumni to help teach and inspire current members of the DP staff. (It was named after the late DP and Philadelphia Daily News reporter who graduated from the College in 1979). One of the items on the agenda concerned board member Stephen Glass. Members who miss three board meetings are history anyway, but although Glass had already missed the last two and was unlikely to attend any more, the matter had to be addressed. “There was no discussion,” said board president Ira Apfel, C’90, in a terse e-mail, “because there was nothing to discuss. I simply said that Stephen Glass has now missed three board meetings, board by-laws state that any board member who misses three consecutive meetings in a row is automatically removed from the board, next agenda item.”
And so, with no fanfare, a chapter that had begun so brilliantly some eight years before came to a close. It was hard to believe that only last year, one of the Marquez Conference panel discussions focused on editorial judgment — and that one of the five panelists was Stephen Glass.
SIDEBAR
Spinning Glass
Most Journalists are flagellants by nature. They prefer to apply the lash to outsiders, of course, but when one of their own violates the most basic tenets of the faith, they engage in a sort of ritual purification, full of thundering denunciations and psychoanalytic wailing. (Lest this sound overly flip, the flagellation is undoubtedly preferable to the alternative, which is to keep quiet and save the scourging for outside sinners.) This year, there has been a lot of bloodletting, as not only Stephen Glass but two writers at the Boston Globe were discovered to have fabricated stories. Glass’s fall, however, was far and away the most dramatic — and the most ripe for exegesis.
Enough scribes have already attempted to divine the sources of his unravelling that further attempts are unnecessary. But since some of the theories offered are both plausible and fascinating, it’s worth listing the more salient ones — with counterarguments:
Glass had wildly overextended himself — not only was he on staff at The New Republic and was free-lancing for George, Rolling Stone,and Harpers; he was also an evening student at Georgetown Law School. So why didn’t he cut out the free-lancing until he was out of law school, or take a leave of absence from The New Republic?
He was under enormous pressure to succeed — his parents had wanted him to become a doctor, and didn’t believe he could make a real living at journalism. So are lots of people, especially those who have worked at the DP.
He had a gift and a compulsion for mind games — at Highland Park High School in suburban Chicago, he had participated in a theatrical program known as “Adventures of the Mind,” designed to encourage fast, inventive thinking. So — what about the other Adventurers? It’s unlikely that they all took the lessons of that program so to heart.
He became overly enamored of Literary Journalism — and when he couldn’t find the perfect character or quote or anecdote for his work, he simply made them up. Most ink-stained wretches try to write the most literate and liveliest story they can, and while they sometimes make mistakes of fact and judgment, they don’t take that to mean they have carte blanche to invent.
The current journalistic climate in America is so brutally competitive that only those who consistently dazzle and whose work sizzles with attitude and edge can really be successful. It can still be done honestly, and not every good magazine has an attitude addiction. But it’s an interesting point. Dan Schiller, ASC’76, Gr’78, professor of communication at the University of California-San Diego and author of Objectivity and the News, questions why “the market-driven system of journalism itself escapes censure when individual journalists are the major targets of blame.” Though Schiller argues that today’s market-driven system is not the only one possible, he also says that it “goes without saying that any attempt to propose reforms that might challenge the ability of media owners to configure news any way they please is taken as an absolutely unacceptable infringement of press freedom itself.”
Glass was a manipulative, cold-blooded liar all along, or he became one.Most people who knew him in the DPdays scoff at the former; nobody really knows about the latter.
“There are two basic lines of thought” among Glass’s former colleagues, says former 34th Street editor Matt Selman, C’93, now a writer for The Simpsons. “Either he’s evil, and he hid it, or he was kind of insane. He couldn’t control it, like it was this crazy pathology. Some people think he was very Machiavellian about it. Some think his psyche was such that he just lost control. When you get right down to it, it’s all kind of bullshit, a lot of just talking and talking and talking.”
“I firmly believe that he is not evil,” says Ken Baer, C’94. “He’s a good person and for whatever reason he did something really wrong. I hope he figures out why he did this and moves on.”
“I think a lot of people are still waiting for Steve to talk and explain what he did and what happened,” says Peter Spiegel, C’92. “That’s when we’ll really know the insight behind the fabrications.”
