Stephen Glass

Martinez column: In Monday's California section, Al Martinez said that Stephen Glass "must hold some kind of record for writing 23 pieces for Nation magazine that contained partial or total lies." Glass wrote for the New Republic.

Thanks to David Shaw for an interesting piece on Mitch Albom ["How One Careless Act Became a Really Big Deal," April 24]. It raised interesting points to think about, such as "pre-writing" and lax copy editing for columnists of high stature. I slightly disagree with Shaw about Albom's fate at the Free Press. I think he should have been fired automatically for what he did. His telling readers that Cleaves and Richardson were at the game, when they in fact weren't, was a fabrication of the same type as Jayson Blair's and Stephen Glass'.

There are some books you can't put down and other books you can't wait to put down. Into the latter category falls "The Fabulist." Not only is it bad, it's embarrassing. The author is Stephen Glass, the journalist who back in 1998 admitted to lying in 23 articles he wrote for the respected New Republic. The film "Shattered Glass" is based on his downfall. I've had his book for quite a while.

Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, two young journalists notorious for fabricating stories, have something else in common: Both have written highly publicized books that few people are buying. Blair, a former New York Times reporter, received a six-figure advance for "Burning Down My Master's House." Published March 6, the book had an announced first printing of 250,000 and plenty of media coverage, including author interviews with Katie Couric on NBC and Larry King on CNN.

He is charming, brilliant, socially facile and shameless. If his mouth is moving, he is probably lying, and when he is caught, he will smile and stick around to pose for pictures. All of which makes him indispensable, archetypally speaking. Because there is no audience that won't be mesmerized, no simmering social problem that won't be brought to a boil, by the entrance of the Trickster. He's almost always a man because we still like our women more virtuous than not.

What a strange mixture of relief and resentment must have overtaken Stephen Glass upon waking up one morning to learn he'd been supplanted by Jayson Blair of the New York Times as journalism's most accomplished young liar.

In 1982, after a single semester at Northwestern University, Billy Ray left the school's lauded Medill School of Journalism dejected. "The only C I've ever gotten was in a writing course at Medill," says Ray, who returned to hometown Los Angeles, enrolled at UCLA's film school and just a few years after graduation was making his living as a screenwriter. Now Ray has returned to the world of print media by writing and directing a movie about a much grander kind of journalistic disgrace.

We take you now to the weekly staff meeting at the New Republic, a major player in American political journalism, a publication that likes to think of itself as "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One." Associate editor and resident wunderkind Stephen Glass has just regaled everyone with a description of yet another irresistible upcoming story. "Where," one jealous colleague whispers to another, "does he find all these people?" Long story short: He made them up.

Like most Americans, I'm appalled by the very thought that some of society's worst miscreants can turn their misdeeds into hard cash with book deals, movie sales and the increasingly lucrative lecture circuit. As a journalist, I'm especially bothered when the likes of Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke and Stephen Glass try to profit from betraying their colleagues and besmirching their profession.

A strange, somewhat uncomfortable feeling overcame me the other day as I walked out of the Hollywood premiere of "Shattered Glass," a movie about notorious journalistic fabricator Stephen Glass. Here, on screen, was the tale of my onetime friend's meteoric rise at the New Republic magazine and how his career came crashing down in 1998 after he invented a story about computer hackers. It later was determined that he made up all or part of more than two dozen stories at the magazine.