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rarely held accountable, and that only egregious lying over a protracted interval
eventually risks discovery and exposure. Had Stephen Glass been just a little less
of a liar, had he more often tempered his lies, more often redirected them from the
powerful to the powerless, he would today not only still be working as a reporter,
but winning prizes. Thus, the example of Stephen Glass serves to demonstrate the
viability of the hypothesis that misinformation and disinformation in the media is
widespread, and that the three examples mentioned above, and the many more documented
throughout the Ukrainian Archive, may not be exceptional deviations at all, but
rather the tip of an iceberg in an industry which is largely unregulated, which is
largely lacking internal mechanisms of quality control, which is responsive not to
truth, but to the dictates of ruling forces.
Another question which may be asked is whether Stephen Glass is the product of some
sub-culture which condones or encourages lying, or which even offers training in
lying.
The following excerpts, then, are from Buzz Bissinger, Shattered Glass, Vanity Fair,
September, 1998, pp. 176-190. The quoted portions are in gray boxes; the headings in
navy blue, however, have been introduced in the UKAR posting, and were not in the
original. I now present to you Stephen Glass largely on the possibility that our new
understanding of Stephen Glass will deepen our existing understanding of other
record-breaking, media-manipulating liars that have been featured on the Ukrainian
Archive, ones such as Yaakov Bleich, Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon
Wiesenthal.
One precondition of exceptional lying may be an intellectual mediocrity which puts a
low ceiling on the success that can be achieved through licit means. Thus, Stephen
Glass, although performing well in high school, began to perform poorly in University,
and when he began work as a reporter, was discovered to not know how to write:
Glass began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 on a pre-medical
curriculum. According to various accounts, he held his own at the beginning. But
then his grades nose-dived. He apparently flunked one course and barely passed
another, suggesting that he had simply lost interest in being on a pre-med track,
or had done poorly on purpose to shut the door to any future career in medicine.
Glass ultimately majored in anthropology. He reportedly did well in this area of
study, but given his inconsistent performance in pre-med courses, his overall
grade-point average at Penn was hardly distinguished - slightly less than a B.
"His shit wasn't always as together as everyone thought it was," said Matthew
Klein, who roomed with Glass at Penn when he was a senior and Glass a junior.
There were indicators to Klein that Glass was not doing particularly well
academically, but Glass never acknowledged it. "He always said he was doing fine,
doing fine," said Klein. (pp. 185-186)
Those familiar with his early work said he struggled with his writing. His
original drafts were rough, the prose clunky and imprecise. (p. 186)
A second precondition of exceptional lying may be growing up in a subculture which
encourages lying, or merely condones it, or at least does not actively work to
suppress it. The Bissinger article offers us next to no information on this topic, except
for the following brief statement:
Harvard educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot spent a good deal of time at Highland
Park High School researching her 1983 book, The Good High School: Portraits of
Character and Culture. She was impressed with the school's stunning academic
programs but noted that values such as character and morality were sometimes
little more than brushstrokes against the relentlessness of achievement. (p. 185)
The first steps on the path to high achievement in lying will, of course, be timid and
cautious, but when the lack of repercussions is discovered, will become bolder:
At first the made-up parts were relatively small. Fictional details were
melded with mostly factual stories. Quotes and vignettes were constructed to add
the edge Kelly seemed to adore. But in the March 31, 1997, issue of The New
Republic, Glass raised the stakes with a report about the Conservative Political
Action Conference. Eight young men, Glass claimed, men with names such as Jason
and Michael, were drinking beer and smoking pot. They went looking for "the
ugliest and loneliest" woman they could find, lured her to their hotel room, and
sexually humiliated her. The piece, almost entirely an invention, was spoken of
with reverence. Subsequent to it, Glass's work began to appear in George, Rolling
Stone, and Harper's.
But challenges to Glass's veracity followed. David A. Keene, chairman of the
American Conservative Union, called Glass "quite a fiction writer" and noted that
the description of the Omni Shoreham room littered with empty bottles from the
mini-bar had a problem. There were no mini-bars in any of the Omni's rooms. (p.
189)
The young liar next discovers, to his amazement, that the exposure, scandal, and
punishment that he feared do not materialize. Questions concerning the veracity of
his work can simply be brushed aside. The chief consequence of his lying is dizzying
success:
At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation's
capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic
to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories
- in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in
modern journalism. (p. 176)
Because this, after all, was Stephen Glass, the compelling wunderkind who had
seeped inside the skins of editors not only at The New Republic but also at
Harper's, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones.
This was the Stephen Glass who had so many different writing contracts that his
income this year might well have reached $150,000 (including his $45,000 New
Republic salary). This was the Stephen Glass whose stories had attracted the
attention not just of Random House - his agent was trying to score a book deal
but of several screenwriters. (p. 180)
There arrives a time when the young liar begins to feel himself invincible. He finds
that no matter how big his lie, he is not exposed, and he extrapolates to imagine that
he leads a charmed life and that his good fortune will continue forever. In view of his
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
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