Too Good to Be True

By ERIC POOLEY

The editors of the New Republic, the famously vociferous magazine of Washington opinion, like to think of themselves as a gimlet-eyed bunch. But when it came to reporter Stephen Glass, their vision was blurred. They regarded Glass, an eager and soft-spoken young man of 25, as a rare talent, able to land the kind of juicy fly-on-the-wall stories that make editors light up. "Steve was someone who could get into rooms other reporters couldn't get into, and come away with quotes and anecdotes the others couldn't get," says Glass's mentor, former New Republic editor Michael Kelly.

Glass wasn't just good at getting into those rooms; he was good at inventing them. He appears to be something rare in journalism: a genuine con man who made up not just quotations but people, corporations, legislation--even a "National Memorabilia Convention" ("held last weekend in Rockville, Md."), where vendors hawked such Lewinsky-related items as an inflatable Monica doll that recited Leaves of Grass.

The serial plagiarist is a familiar journalistic type, but the serial fabulist is rare. Glass concocted story after story and slipped them all past his editors and fact checkers, often buttressing his claims with forged notes and interview transcripts and other bogus documents. His work was challenged from time to time--a March 1997 account of a cocaine-fueled orgy at a young-conservatives conference was hooted at loudly--but his career sailed on, with free-lance contracts from a fistful of magazines.

Until last week. A reporter at the online magazine Forbes Digital Tool tried to verify Glass's latest effort, the lovingly detailed story of a pimply 15-year-old computer hacker recruited by the corporation whose data network he had just penetrated. The piece features vivid characters (a "super-agent to the super-nerds," who is said to represent 300 hackers), a trade association called the National Assembly of Hackers and a California software firm called Jukt Micronics. None of it is real. When Digital Tool started asking questions, Glass created a phony corporate website for Jukt and a bogus voice mail that belonged to his brother's cell phone.

New Republic editor Charles Lane fired Glass and began a review of the 40 articles he had written for the magazine since December 1995. So far, the magazine has retracted three of them and admitted that part of a fourth is also bogus. Editors at the magazine have found many other obvious fictions, ranging from cults that venerate unlikely politicians ("The First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ") to phony interest groups (an "Association for the Advancement of Sound Water Policy"). In one story, Glass told readers he had made up a town--"Werty, Iowa"--to test the speciousness of a policy group. What he didn't say was that he had made up the policy group too.

"We had a scorpion in our shirt," says Lane. "Glass is a man without honor who operated out of hostility and contempt; he has no place in journalism. I've been racking my brain trying to understand how this could have happened."

The easy explanation is that Glass personifies the decline of the New Republic, which once excelled at smart contrarian journalism and has slid into dumb hit-and-run stories (and, in Glass's case, stories in which the car, driver and victim are all faked). That's too simplistic, though it is true that the vigor the magazine enjoyed in the 1980s is largely gone and its staff upheavals--four editors in the past four years, an exodus of many of its best writers--created the atmosphere in which Glass could get lies into print. The magazine (circ. 96,000) beefed up its checking department in 1996, after associate editor Ruth Shalit was caught in two embarrassing plagiarisms. (One of the checkers was Glass.) Last year editor Kelly, after 10 months on the job, was fired by owner Martin Peretz, who was unhappy with Kelly's columns critical of Al Gore, an old friend of Peretz's. Lane took over, and in the turmoil, the checking department dwindled to one staff member. "The editors were desperate for good stuff," says a writer. "A hungry dog doesn't sniff at his bowl before eating."

Lane wasn't the only hungry one. In the youth-happy journalism industry, which catapults reporters into the big leagues before they have learned the fundamentals of their craft, Glass was the latest hot young thing, juggling assignments from Rolling Stone, George, Harper's and the New York Times Magazine. (At night, he went to law school.) Editors at George and Harper's are combing through articles he wrote for them; each has found an untraceable character along with an apparently forged letter Glass provided as "proof" the person exists. All the glossies are dropping Glass as a contributor.

Holed up in his parents' Chicago home, the fabulist isn't talking. But in an interview with National Public Radio, he described a stint as a telephone psychic that he undertook for a Harper's article on the subject. "I started to feel extremely guilty," he said, for taking part in a con in which "the person being conned thinks they're getting some real value and the person committing the con actually thinks they're doing something of value." That, it seems, was Glass's approach to journalism as well.