this: "There's a lot unsaid. You can do whatever you want to do. There's no
comment." (p. 182)
But the result of such a course, at least in some perhaps rare cases, is discovery and
discredit:
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 unraveling.
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.
(p. 176)
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. (p. 180)
Post-mortems of how so much lying had succeeded in entering the media paint an
image of a cunning malefactor eluding stringent quality-control mechanisms.
However, perhaps it is the case that such post-mortems serve to delude the public
into imagining that Stephen Glass is a rare aberration, and not the tip of an iceberg.
Perhaps the reality is that right from the beginning any intelligent and critical superior
could have seen - had he wanted to - that Stephen Glass was a simple and
palpable fraud, and not the cunning genius depicted below:
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. (p. 180)
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