Falling on the sword of truth

Shattered Glass
Some time early on my writing career, during some press junket, I found myself sitting next to a reporter from the Mirror. No doubt triggered by a naïve comment of mine, this cynical middle-aged hack made it his business to put me in the picture about journalism. It was not our job to find the truth, he said, but rather to pander to the prejudices of the masses so as to sell newspapers. I, who had recently received a coveted award for young women journalists, felt somewhat deflated by this view. It seemed to me that the truth was important, and yet who was I to go up against someone of infinitely greater experience than mine? Besides which, I could see that there was a problem with doing journalism the way I was doing it. Each article I wrote was meticulously
researched, taking weeks, even months, to produce — which given the pay, was not a good way to make a living.
All this came back to me when I saw Shattered Glass, Billy Ray’s film based on the true story of a young American journalist called Stephen Glass, who made his name writing for the respected political magazine the New Republic in Washington DC. This guy’s stories were the stuff of genius, with their telling detail and their vivid human interest. The genius, it turned out, was of a perverse kind. Glass had not only warped the facts slightly in one or two pieces. He had made up whole scenarios, places, people and organisations, and this in the overwhelming majority of his articles. It was a devastating blow for a journal which prided itself on its fact-checking procedures. It was also a devastating blow for the profession as a whole, not to mention its now-exposed enfant terrible, who lost career and friends at a stroke.
The character of Glass is played in the film by Hayden Christensen with a nuance
that belies his wooden performance in Star Wars. He creeps and he crawls, he ingratiates himself with his colleagues, a heady mixture of charm school meets the best and the brightest. Women, in particular, get hooked on his appeals to their motherly side. Peter Sarsgaard, as the unpopular and reserved editor who must unravel this mess, is also superb. The irony of his initial attempts to discreetly protect Glass, while the latter is knifing him in the back to win the sympathy of his colleagues, is particularly telling.
Interestingly, someone who actually knew Stephen Glass when he worked at the New Republic has said that in real life he was much more charming, much more convincing, than the way he is portrayed in the film. This is what made it so devastating for his friends and colleagues when the mask was ripped away. Which confirms to me that the moral of the story is not only to do with what one rather foolish, if gifted, young man managed to pull. The fantasy of being successful, of being loved and admired, in some sense made possible the printed fantasies. An obsession with having the “take” — the inside story — not only marks out journalism, but the whole of the gossipy, driven culture in which such journalism thrives.
Look again at the first paragraph of this article. Can you see anything wrong with it? I have tweaked some details, in order to make it into a better story. For example, the reporter I spoke to was in fact from the News of the World, not the Mirror. But hey, what does the truth matter, when one can appear so topical? Note too, the coyly self-deprecating mention of this man’s “superior experience”: in point of fact I thought he was a creep and didn’t take his comments half so seriously as that. And while I did win the prize I mention, I actually had this conversation before, rather than after, that event. But then, a small distortion of reality enabled me to blow my own trumpet. Maybe Glass, too, began in a tiny way and worked up.
Léonie Caldecott