Ian Restil is a 15-year-old computer hacker, wise beyond his years, slick and sophisticated in the ways of sinister deal-making and blackmail. One fine day he breaks into the database of a big-time software firm called Jukt Micronics and uses his precocious wiles to demand money, pornography and a sports car from the beleaguered firm.
What a story it was, when it appeared on May 18th in the respected American magazine, the New Republic. Even more remarkable was the fact that writer Stephen Glass had managed to get it all on the record, extracting names, dates, times and places from the kind of subterranean characters who usually won't even allow a reporter use their first names.
But then the cognoscenti media establishment that presides over Manhattan and inside the Washington, D.C. beltway had begun to expect this kind of bravura performance in the field of what is sometimes called literary non-fiction from Glass, a prolific 25-yearold, Washington-based writer whose reputation as the new hot thing began percolating in 1996. He soon amassed a handful of contracts with other magazines, in addition to his $45,000-a-year gig with the New Republic. George magazine, edited by John Kennedy Junior, signed him up, as did Rolling Stone. As if that wasn't enough, he was writing stories on a freelance basis for the New York Times magazine.
Stephen Glass was, in short, the word made flesh for this febrile media world, ravenous for topicality and competitive for the Next Big Story. He was a good writer, and fast. Not a lot of experience in street journalism, but few and fewer magazine reporters in the United States have trained in the tedious endurance sport of covering local county council meetings.
There was, as it turned out, a plot twist as stunning as any in one of Stephen Glass's stories. Those zippy quotes, those alluring characters that made his prose come alive. . . Glass made it all up. There was no 15-yearold Ian Restil. There was no Jukt Electronics. It emerged, after a quietly toiling reporter named Adam Penenberg at Forbes magazine became suspicious and began an investigation, that Stephen Glass was little more than a highly imaginative journalistic vandal. In his wake, he left a wreckage of some 41 stories at the New Republic, at least 27 of them all or partially fabricated with non-existent characters, companies, conferences and events. All his 1997 stories have since been erased from the magazine's Web site.
The New Republic apologised, but the silence from the rest of the media was initially deafening as nervous editors at other publications scrambled to see if Glass had fabricated stories for them, too. (Little mentioned during all this was that most magazines have fired their fact-checkers in the last few years to save money). George Magazine soon issued an apology for a Glass story about Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan that contained fabricated quotes. Oops.
HOW could it have happened, is the obvious question, but perhaps the more important question is, why did it happen? Before anyone could settle down to ruminate, the US media was hit by a 60-day siege of high-profile blunders that is continuing. There has been in journalism a series of omissions and commissions of deceit or incompetence that has shaken a powerful world that seems all but unshakeable. People have been sacked, others are worried for their jobs, no one seems to know who to trust, and many journalists are despondent over even the seemingly upbeat news, such as New Yorker editor Tina Brown's new multimedia venture. But first let's go back to the beginning of the killing season.
Before the dust settled on the Glass matter, it was revealed that Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith faked quotes in at least four pieces, while another 48 columns are under suspicion. She was fired.
Just as it seemed there might be an end to this outburst of fiction in journalism, as Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz put it, the more pedestrian but perhaps more destructive spectre of sloppiness surfaced. Another bombshell hit two of the most respected brand names in news. Time magazine and CNN are now part of the same corporate ownership under Time Warner, a multinational entertainment and news conglomerate that since a huge merger several years ago have promised to synergise their journalistic enterprises. Until now, that synergy has involved little more than occasionally sticking wrinkled and twitching Time print reporters in front of CNN cameras. The television programme Newstand in June was the real launch of such hoped-for synergy, its first outing an investigative episode purporting to prove that the US used nerve gas in Vietnam. While the programme was aired on CNN, hosted by veteran correspondent Peter Arnett, an accompanying written article appeared in Time with Arnett's byline and that of producer April Oliver.
When the story was being developed, seasoned reporters inside both Time and CNN questioned its veracity. Time Pentagon correspondent, Mark Thompson, voiced serious concerns, as did his counterpart at CNN. But this programme was part of a flashy and hyped publicity launch and their concerns were given short shrift.
It was bad enough when the story proved not to be fabricated but to have been so sloppily researched that its explosive conclusion could not be supported. Worse, in the views of some, was that Peter Arnett told colleagues that he had written not a comma of the Time story that appeared under his byline, and that he had had little to do with the CNN report. He was, he told CNN colleagues, brought in for marketing reasons. That such an esteemed newsman would allow himself to be used in that way has disappointed and infuriated journalists both within and outside Time and CNN.
Christiane Amanapour, a star foreign correspondent for CNN, blasted her colleague Arnett in the pages of the New York Times. Journalists at Time wondered how things got to the point where at the very least an article written by someone else could appear under Arnett's byline in Time magazine. (It should be disclosed here that this reporter is a former staff journalist at Time and is currently a contributor.) Said one source at CNN, who did not wish their name to be used, "People around here are despondent. I can't believe how upset they are. I've seen death penalty cases where everybody wasn't so upset."
This Sturm und Drang may seem peculiar to a public that already has little respect for reporters. But the fact is that most journalists in in the US take their jobs and responsibilities seriously, viewing their jobs as distinct from the entertainment business. But the presence of hundreds of competing cable television channels as well as more magazines is creating a frenzied atmosphere. It is this climate, some feel, that is responsible for both the temptation to fabricate taller tales and the move to rush half-baked stories onto the air and into print.
"The journalist is focused on the economic demands, not on the demands of the information he or she is working with," said Bill Kovach, the director of the Harvard University Nieman Foundation. The trend to turn mouldy reportage into entertainment is not only creating errors, intentional and otherwise. It is providing a kind of self-censorship of less sexy news. As Newsweek media critic Jonathan Alter wrote: "We are all so terrified of losing audience that we're rapidly morphing into an entertainment medium. Consistent foreign coverage? Please. India's intention to test nukes was a matter of public record last year, and top US newspapers ignored it." Sadly, some of the best are being pushed from the business. On June 30th, in the atmosphere of the current fracas, US News and World Report (a magazine with circulation of 2.2 million) editor, Jim Fallows, was fired from his job of 22 months by his bosses, Mort Zuckerman and Harold Evans (the same Harold Evans who is Tina Brown's husband.) Fallows is one of the most serious and respected journalists in the US, and the author of a well-reviewed book on the media. His infractions included disagreeing with his bosses' decision to cost-cut by closing the London, Jerusalem and Beijing bureaus, voicing discomfort with a plan to run a 10-part serialisation of Evans's forthcoming book on American history, and refusing to give the killing of Gianni Versace more than a single page. And finally, according to people at the magazine, Fallows baulked at assigning a story about Hispanic culture to Bianca Jagger, the former wife of Mick Jagger who Evans once dated.
The appropriate peak to this strange time was the announcement last week that Tina Brown, the Oxford-educated editor (or editrix, as the wags have it) who herself is always a hot story, was leaving the money-losing New Yorker magazine to start a multimedia conglomerate under the auspices of Disney. The company will produce a magazine, books, movies and television programmes. The concept is again called synergy, and while some are cheering Brown's venture, others are concerned that it portends the exact transformation of news into entertainment that has produced the fiascos of the past weeks.
"I am very concerned about this as a trend," said one writer for Vanity Fair magazine. "Does this mean journalists are supposed to become screenwriters? That as we are writing a magazine article we'll be thinking about how it will play as a movie? I think that is what's happening and I think it's dangerous." Chances are that Stephen Glass would agree.
Perhaps the final word on Tina Brown and the media maelstrom should come from Maureen Dowd, the ascerbic New York Times columnist. Last week she characterised Brown's ascent to Hollywood in a column employing the hyper-speak of a Hollywood pitch. It's a kind of My Fair Lady meets My Cousin Vinny, parodied Dowd, of the plot starring "Tina!"
"Will our heroine ever realise synergy is dumb?" asked Dowd. "Will she follow her agenda instead of her heart and only figure out when it is too late, as did Time and CNN, that synergy is a recipe for disaster or mediocrity? Star vehicle for Kristin Scott Thomas. Potential merchandising tie-in for female action figure that is a cross between Mary Poppins and Rambo. Surprise ending. Designed for sequels."