perceived impunity, he sees no need to moderate lying, and so he escalates it:
Stephen Glass rode the fast curve of instant ordainment that encircles the
celebrity age of the 90s; his reputation in the incestuous world of Washington
magazine journalism exploded so exponentially after a few of his better-than-true
stories that he could basically write anything and get away with it, regardless of
the fact that his reporting almost always uncovered the near incredible and was
laden with shoddy sourcing. His reports described events which occurred at
nebulous locations, and included quotes from idiosyncratic characters (with no
last names mentioned) whose language suggested the street poetry of Kerouac and
the psychological acuity of Freud. He had an odd, prurient eye for a
department-store Santa with an erection and evangelists who liked getting naked in
the woods. And nobody called his bluff. What finally brought Stephen Glass down
was himself.
He kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his performance, going
beyond his production of fake notes, a fake Web site, a fake business card, and
memos by pulling his own brother into his fading act for a guest appearance.
Clearly, he would have done anything to save himself.
"He wanted desperately to save his ass at the expense of anything," said
Chuck Lane. "He would have destroyed the magazine."
The saga of Stephen Glass is wrenching, shameful, and sad. His actions are
both destructive and self-destructive, and if there is an explanation for them,
his family has chosen not to offer it. Repeated attempts to interview Stephen
were rebuffed, and all his father, Jeffrey Glass, said in a phone conversation was
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)
HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1017 hits since 9Dec98
Jeffrey Goldberg Globe and Mail 6Feb93 Fabricating history
Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the
761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the
most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the
three men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.
McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the
761st."
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 6, 1993, D2.
FILM FRAUD
The liberation
that wasn't
A PBS DOCUMENTARY CLAIMS A BLACK U.S. ARMY UNIT
FREED JEWISH INMATES FROM GERMAN CONCENTRATION
CAMPS. NICE STORY, BUT NOT TRUE, SAY THE SOLDIERS
BY JEFFREY GOLDBERG
THE NEW REPUBLIC
NEW YORK
It was a rare moment: Rev. Jesse Jackson, surrounded by white-haired Holocaust
survivors, embracing Leib Glanz, a bearded Hasidic rabbi, on the stage of the
Apollo Theater in Harlem. The occasion was a black-Jewish celebration of the
Liberators, the PBS documentary about all-black U.S. Army units that, according
to the film, helped capture Buchenwald and Dachau. The sponsors of the
screening, Time Warner and a host of rich and influential New Yorkers, billed
the film as an important tool in the rebuilding of a black-Jewish alliance.
But the display of brotherhood turned out to be illusory. The next night
Rabbi Glanz was nearly chased out of synagogue by angry Hasidim for the
transgression of consorting with Mr. Jackson. More significantly, the film's
backers and the press failed to point out that the unit featured most
prominently in the Liberators had no hand in the capture of either Dachau or
Buchenwald in Germany. "It's a lie. We were nowhere near these camps when
they were liberated," says E. G. McConnell, an original member of the 761st
Tank Battalion. He says he co-operated with the filmmakers until he came to
believe they were faking material.
Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the
761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the
most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the three
men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.
McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the
761st."
'It's totally inaccurate.
The men couldn't have been
where they say they were
because the camp was 60
miles away from where we
were on the day of liberation'
Nina Rosenblum, who co-produced the film with Bill Miles in association
with WNET, New York's public television station, admits that the narration of
the scene "may be misleading." But she says Mr. McConnell can't be trusted.
"You can't speak to him because he's snapped. He was hit on the head with
shrapnel and was severely brain-damaged." Mr. McConnell, a retired mechanic
fro Trans World Airlines Inc., laughs when told of the statement. "If I was so
disturbed, why did they use me in the film?" he asks.
His claim is supported by a host of veterans of the 761st, including the
battalion's commander, the president of its veterans' association, two
sergeants and two company commanders, among them the black commander of C
Company.
Two of the company's soldiers assert in the film that they liberated
Dachau. Yet a statement issued by historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum states they could find no evidence that the 761st Battalion helped free
either camp.
"It's totally inaccurate," says Charles Gates, the former captain who
commanded C Company. "The men couldn't have been where they say they were
because the camp was 60 miles away from where we were on the day of
liberation."
Paul Bates, the colonel who commanded the battalion, confirmed Mr. Gates's
account. "In our after-action reports, there is no indication that we were
near either one of the camps," Mr. Bates says. According to him, tanks of the
761st were assigned to the 71st Infantry Division, whose fighting path across
Germany was 100 to 160 kilometres away from the two camps. "The 71st does not
claim to have liberated those camps," he says.
Several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film and in the companion
book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they were liberated by
blacks of these units. But Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has
conducted extensive research on the film, says two of the survivors featured in
the Liberators told him they were no longer sure when they first saw black
soldiers.
One of the survivors who appeared with Mr. Jackson at the Apollo confirmed
that he too was unsure of what had happened at Buchenwald. "It's hard to say.
I know there were black soldiers in the camp, but I don't know when exactly,"
says the survivor.