The Long Take: Shattered Glass, 26 and 21 years later.
Revisiting one of journalism’s biggest fabrication scandals and the movie that's based on it.
The phrase ‘grain of truth’ is often used to emphasize an important point deep beneath a layer of low-level arguments. As a rhetorical tool, it is used to provide nuance and to show that an argument will eventually be validated, as more information comes out. But the phrase also means that the grain is small enough not to overshadow the woeful qualities of these sentences, and can prove to be deceptive, when it’s not properly thought out. In the case of journalism, it is used to highlight a topic that has been sensationalized or it has been overlooked, while understating everything else.
Shattered Glass was not a box office hit when it first came out in 2003. Despite having featured Hayden Christensen - fresh off of playing Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels - in the lead role, it grossed $2 million domestically against a $6 million budget. But its reputation, more than 20 years after its release, has steadily increased as one of the greatest films about journalism. Unlike All The President’s Men and Spotlight, the film, directed by Billy Ray, is not about an achievement, but a failure, revealing the true nature of journalism’s shallow culture that we can still find today.
Stephen Glass is the subject of Shattered Glass, and his fabrications at the progressive magazine The New Republic remain one of journalism’s greatest scandals. It was so bad, that many journalism courses have included the film in its curriculum to demonstrate what fabrication looks like. It was not just an indictment of him, but his editors, the magazine and the profession of journalism.
By the age of 24, he was one of the magazine’s rising stars and became one of the magazine’s associate editors. The New Republic was once labelled as “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One” and at the time of Glass’s employment, it took a more heterodox and open direction, distant from its progressive roots, especially when he started working under the wing of Andrew Sullivan, a young gay conservative who took over in 1991. Sullivan was succeeded by Michael Kelly (Hank Azaria), who was beloved by many of the staff, before its publisher Marty Peretz fired and replaced him with Charles Lane (Peter Sarsgaard), now a columnist for The Washington Post.
According to the Vanity Fair article the film was based on, Glass had a passion for journalism, earning him the loyalty of the magazine’s staff writers, who felt excited by any pitch he made in the meeting room. These pitches include a dispatch at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he follows a group of young and drunk conservatives and a wild story of a teenage hacker who was hired by an electronics company called Jukt Micronic as a security consultant. These were the stories that were ‘too good to be true’ and as a result, he has been paid $45,000 a year for his work (in 2024, that’s the equivalent of US $53707.37).
However, there were some gaping holes in these articles. For the piece about CPAC, titled “Spring Breakdown”, there was no minibar, which would have shown there was alcoholism involved throughout the raucous behaviour. In “Hack Heaven”, Jukt Micronic never existed, the hacker convention never happened and one of the executives who “worked” there was Glass’s brother, whose Palo Alto number was used in the story. The latter was discovered by Charles Lane, who immediately fired Glass. Following that, a further 27 of the 41 articles he wrote were listed to have either been partially or fully fabricated. Glass’s career as a journalist was gone for good.
Shattered Glass is an incredibly subtle piece of work. Its depiction of each character involved in the scandal is complex, and it's enhanced by the excellent lead performances of Hayden Christensen and Peter Sarsgaard. According to director Billy Ray, Shattered Glass was structured like a high school movie. Glass was the cool kid, whereas Lane was the ‘geek nobody liked.’ It’s fascinated in how the story turns out to be false, revealing certain details that could indicate what had happened. Glass was someone with a high imagination while Lane just does his job to, not only figure out the dark side of his inferiors but ensure that the magazine’s reputation was not torn apart, ultimately earning the high respect of his colleagues. The story’s moral is simple, but very effective.
Shattered Glass holds up as a dry, yet cold portrayal of journalism’s numerous weaknesses. During the decades since its release, the image of modern journalism has become polarizing, especially following the era of Donald Trump’s leadership. Consistently low in trust, many of its detractors felt that modern-day journalists look to affirm any biases wherever they go, overlook important facts and conjure up mobs against smaller people. Its proponents, however, still see journalism as a correction to the ills of society. Either way, Glass embodied all of his flaws, with the belief that he was doing the latter and there’s no doubt that there are more people like him in today’s atomized media landscape.
A big reservation to be had about Shattered Glass is that the film’s substance doesn’t force the viewer to reckon with the structure that enabled his journalism. Billy Ray is less interested in why Glass has to lie, especially once he is caught in the act by The New Republic’s competitors and then his colleagues. But that question remains as important as ever.
There are several factors that could have caused Glass’s terrible actions. The first factor is the amount of pressure to be had in working for a small magazine in Washington DC. Despite the promise of a lucrative career, staff writers are overall, underpaid and overworked. Anecdotally, Kyle Smith, a film critic for The Wall Street Journal, says that an entry-level gig he once applied for at The New Republic was “about $270 a year in 1992.” Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, then Glass’s colleague at Heritage Foundation’s magazine Policy Review, told The Washington Post “there’s a lot of stress to put out attack pieces on larger targets.” Now, the incentives for magazine journalism have been severely limited by the lack of demand for print, in favor of the digital terrain.
The second possibility is Glass’s pre-determined biases, mainly shaped by working inside the magazine. Glass’s dispatch on CPAC was music to ears for everyone at The New Republic. It slams conservatives as sexual predators and are easy to condemn. But by contributing to The New Republic’s contrarian direction, Glass also targeted the Centre for Science in Public Interest and the Drug Abuse Resistance Education America, both of whom wrote letters to the magazine countering his false claims. But it was his eagerness to please other people that impacted the way his colleagues reacted to his stories that play into his biases. He would compliment the receptionist, buy his colleagues lunch during a busy day, and it was easy for them to think Glass was a harmless man, who is always aware that one error hurts many people.
The third factor is Glass’s mild-mannered personality. According to Bissinger, he had little self-confidence in himself. Glass was raised in a wealthy family at Highland Park that prides itself on achievement. Stephen pursued medicine and followed the path of his parents, but his academic performance was mediocre. So he compensated himself with journalism, where he finally found an avenue he loved doing. To keep his family happy, Glass studied at Georgetown Law School while making a commitment to his journalism. A mixture of low self-esteem, but higher likeability among his co-workers meant that Lane was initially reluctant to throw him under the bus when Forbes chased up The New Republic to fact-check the article. (Following his firing, Hannah Roisin barged into his office, slamming Lane for firing him).
In the film, you see Glass pleading to his editors about his own failures, but Billy Ray doesn’t let Glass escape from his own failure and holds him responsible for his malice. Jacob Weisberg, who was formerly a New Republic writer, says that it runs deeper than careerists taking advantage of the opportunity to work for a magazine. The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan V Last says that Glass’s biases, free of any conviction and principle, had converged into slander, especially with people he disagrees with, stating “There is a particular type of journalist who spurns the input of outsiders and believes that there is no truth beyond his magazine's horizon.” As for the psychological damage felt by Glass, it became less excusable, as it devolved into what Andrew Sullivan describes as contrition and emotional manipulation. Sullivan tells his former colleague when sharing a panel together “If you have any integrity, you would have gone away [...] I didn’t know anybody at the New Republic who was as loved as you.”
In a review of Shattered Glass for The Weekly Standard, Last says that almost everybody got away with it in the film. By the end of the film, Lane finally gets the credit that he deserves, when the editor’s room applauds him for exposing Glass. It shows that, despite its flaws, mainstream publications like The New Republic can make themselves accountable, with the right tools to be properly used and keep their integrity under wraps. And yet, according to Last, his editors ignored the letters that demanded immediate retractions and they sympathised with Glass way too much, because he felt damaged by his initial errors. They shouldn’t give themselves a pat on the back for finally doing their jobs, after months of inquisition from Forbes and several organisations framed by this.
Less than three decades after the release of Shattered Glass, the reports that Glass had some seeds of truth. The CPAC conference has become ideologically rowdier, becoming more sensitive to any journalists reporting on the event. Hackers like Julian Assange and Anonymous are more capable of disrupting the political landscape, by leaking confidential information to the public, focusing on the failures of military and government institutions, and facing serious legal consequences for doing so. Had Glass not fabricated his reporting, and provided proper communication with his editors, these stories would already have been revelatory and provocative enough to create useful information.
In 2014, The New Republic was struggling and was bought by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, resulting in mass resignations and layoffs, which included Jonathan Chait who served as a contributing editor. This crisis meant that the magazine took an editorial direction further to the Left.
By then, the magazine was not the only publication to experience such institutional capture. As Zach Goldberg notes, concept creep has swept across most mainstream outlets, meaning that data results looking up for terms like “racism”, “white supremacy” have tripled in recent years (racism has appeared 4000 times in The Washington Post). Concept creep has meant that The New Republic has not only distanced themselves from Glass, but the Clinton/Peretz era that Glass belong to has become a relic.
In the same year of Shattered Glass’s release, Stephen Glass wrote a fictional novel called The Fabulist, which details his personal view of the fabrication. Roisin initially condemned the book saying, five years later, “he hasn’t changed that much.” But ten years later, the parts that infuriated her became minor, as he was interviewed by her again at the same magazine he was working in.
According to the 2014 interview, with The New Republic commemorating its 100th year, Glass has since embarked on a legal career and the scandal made him feel very remorseful about it. In 2011, he almost passed the bar exam at Georgetown University, and failed because he did not pass the moral questionable test thanks to his journalistic career. He now works as a director of special prosecutions at a personal injury law firm in Beverley Hills named Carpenter, Zuckerman, Rowley. Twelve times a month, and given the nature of the job, Glass has to tell every client that he was a liar too. There’s a tale of redemption that lies somewhere, in spite of his big scandal that follows him everywhere he goes.
Few scandals matched the scope of the Glass scandal, but his ethos of swindling goes beyond the world of mainstream journalism, and into the landscape of alternative media. After Glass, came Jayson Blair in 2003, who was caught fabricating and plagiarising his own stories at The New York Times. So long as journalism exists, the pathos of Stephen Glass remains prominent in many media circles today. And only, it only gets better when individual examples of bad journalism is called out.
Shattered Glass does not portray its subject as a master manipulator, but a human being who makes numerous mistakes. In the film’s opening scene, Glass, as portrayed by Christensen, he’s a people pleaser, a man who shows curiosity about the things he reports and a total liar. While I said that there are more Glasses in the world, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily cartoonish villains. That’s the grain of truth, but it doesn’t change the fact that they have deceived their readers and the consequences are only catching up with them.