Forwarded from: William Knowles <wkat_private> 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." *==============================================================* "Communications without intelligence is noise; Intelligence without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ================================================================ C4I.org - Computer Security, & Intelligence - http://www.c4i.org *==============================================================* - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomoat_private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
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