Stephen Glass Waits for Prime Time to Say 'I Lied'

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: William Knowles <wk () c4i org>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23059-2003May6.html

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 7, 2003

Stephen Glass, who had never uttered a public word about his repeated 
fabrications at the New Republic five years ago, is cashing in on his 
notoriety.

"I lied to the people who were my co-workers and cared about me," he 
told "60 Minutes" in an interview airing Sunday to promote a 
forthcoming novel. "I lied to my family. I lied to my editors. I lied 
to all of the readers, and I lied to the people I was writing about."

Why the massive deception? "I loved the electricity of people liking 
my stories," Glass told correspondent Steve Kroft. When he would 
describe his work at staff meetings, "I think I confused them liking 
my stories with them liking me. So I did it again. I wanted every 
story to be a home run."

In "The Fabulist," being published by Simon & Schuster, Glass uses 
only one real name -- his own -- in a fictionalized treatment of how 
he bamboozled the world as a 25-year-old New Republic writer who 
always seemed to have the most colorful scenes and the most perfect 
quotes. Perhaps fittingly, the other characters all have fake names.

Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic's literary editor, said yesterday 
that "even in his reckoning of his crimes, he seems incapable of 
nonfiction. It's unbelievable. This may be the first novel ever 
written for the sole purpose of avoiding fact-checking.

"The publisher and the media are compliant in a callow man's attempt 
to profit from some of the worst aspects of American life," said 
Wieseltier. "In the American media, crime is a form of upward 
mobility, because it makes celebrity possible. It's really 
disgusting."

Charles Lane, the former New Republic editor who fired Glass in 1998, 
said he was stunned "that someone could do what Steve did and cash in 
on it, but I guess that's the way America works these days. If Steve 
were as contrite as he purports to be on national television, the more 
appropriate first step would have been to contact the numbers of 
people at the New Republic who were his close friends and tell them 
individually and personally how sorry he feels.

"That would have really taken courage," said Lane, now a Washington 
Post reporter.

Kroft said yesterday that Glass "was contrite and somewhat pathetic. 
So apologetic, incredibly apologetic. He portrayed himself as someone 
who was really sort of hopeless, and wasn't good enough to do this 
without cheating."

Glass was canned after Lane discovered that he had invented a teenage 
computer hacker, as well as created a phony Web site for the 
fictitious company said to have been penetrated by the hacker. The New 
Republic eventually found that two-thirds of the 41 stories he wrote 
were at least partially fabricated.

One part of the CBS interview was conducted at Washington's Hyatt 
Regency, where Glass had described a nonexistent computer conference 
involving the made-up hacker.

In the interview, Glass said that his profile of superlawyer Vernon 
Jordan, which ran in now-defunct George magazine, "contained some of 
the worst fabrications that I wrote. I said that he had behaved 
lecherously toward young women, and I provided anonymous or poorly 
identified individuals to say that about him. . . . I wanted a story 
that I thought would be the perfect story."

In a New Republic piece about Michael Jacobson, the head of the Center 
for Science in the Public Interest, Glass described in great detail 
how Jacobson would try to wring the grease from his food while dining 
in a Chinese restaurant: " 'His mush makes you quite suddenly lose 
your appetite,' said one of Jacobson's veteran dining companions."

But Glass admitted that "I never spoke to anyone who dined with him. I 
never spoke to a restaurant that said that happened. . . . No, there 
was no truth to that."

Glass also made up White House interns, drug users, the "First Church 
of George Herbert Walker Christ" and a "get-naked" room at a 
conservative political conference. He deceived the magazine's 
fact-checkers with forged notes and fake press releases.

Glass, who went on to graduate from Georgetown Law School and is the 
subject of a forthcoming movie, is one of a number of reporters at 
prominent publications who have been dismissed for journalistic sins.

Last week Jayson Blair, a young New York Times reporter, resigned 
after lifting an interview from another newspaper about a woman who 
had lost a son in Iraq. In a statement read to the Associated Press, 
Blair said: "I have been struggling with recurring personal issues, 
which have caused me great pain. I am now seeking appropriate 
counseling . . . and I regret what I have done."


 
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