Shattered Glass

Reality is a reconstruction of our ideas of what reality is, as much as the social is a reenactment of what we think the social ought to be like.

This came to my mind yesterday when I saw the film Shattered Glass, which tells the true story of Stephen Glass, journalist and editor at The New Republic, who cooked up at least a dozen articles for the magazine. It’s one of the big scandals in the history of American journalism, The New Republic is one of the most influential political magazines in the USA, but it also reveals a lot about how we perceive reality.

“I wanted a story that I thought would be the perfect story. And that the readers would most enjoy to read.”
– Stephen Glass

Glass later explained in an interview how it all started with a fantasy about how a certain quote would really make an article work. It expanded to the devising of details and small events that never happened and ultimately climaxed into the cooking up of entire articles. Glass was known for being a kind, soft-spoken person and later he explained his motives were of social nature. He wanted to be appreciated.  A similar incident occurred at the New York Times and led to a crisis in the entire journalistic industry.

But obviously there is a problem in the rejection of such practices. Inevitably, journalism is always a representation of reality. And as such, all journalistic reporting is a manipulation of events through rhetoric, perception, editing, dramatization and so on and so forth. In fact, condemning what Glass did might even be dangerous. It dissimulates the corrupt and manipulative potential of news production. The status quo disarms any possible insinuation of news manipulation by excluding Glass’s practice. Denouncing Glass as a liar implies that conventional journalism is truthful and, needless to say, it isn’t. Or rather: it can’t be. It is interesting, instead, to rethink Glass’s way of writing in relation to our conventional conception of reality. It might prove the plot is thicker than Glass’s manipulation and not only conventional journalism is corrupting reality, but everyday existence is enhanced, dramatized and manipulated in great many ways.

The article that ultimately exposed his fraud, Hack Heaven, can be read here. It tells the story of a 15-year old pimpled hacker who gets a lucrative contract from a major software company after hacking their database. The entire article turned out to be cooked up.