"Shattered Glass"



I rented this 2003 movie on DVD mostly because I wanted to get a cinematic handle on why The New Republic magazine (TNR), a liberal bastion for many years, had by 2004 become nothing more than a slave to the right wing neocon echo machine. (I was a dedicated subscriber from 1980 till 2004, by which time I wouldn't even want to use it for toilet paper, it had deteriorated so.) The Glass episode was the most significant event that occurred at the magazine during the long decline of the 1990's:

This film tells the true story of fraudulent Washington, D.C. journalist Stephen Glass (Christensen), who rose to meteoric heights as a young writer in his 20s, becoming a staff writer at "The New Republic" for three years (1995-1998), where 27 of his 41 published stories were either partially or completely made up. Looking for a short cut to fame, Glass concocted sources, quotes and even entire stories, but his deception did not go unnoticed forever, and eventually, his world came crumbling down...

I remember reading Glass' stories and liking them a lot. People tend to like stories that confirm their world views, and Glass did that very well. I especially liked the story of drunken depravity at the Young Conservative's conference, and it just figures that the story was completely invented. Lies sell.

The movie disappoints in that it doesn't aim to tell the bigger story of TNR's corruption at the hands of Editor-in-Chief Martin Peretz, but it does suggest that part of the impulse to lie to readers comes from a desire to please them - a message that can apply to other magazines as well. Thus, the media corruption of the Bush years stems, in part, from that same desire to please.

Grovel, grovel, grovel.....