Posted on 05/11/2003 6:19:04 PM PDT by Liz
PHOTO Stephen Glass has written a novel about his life called “The Fabulist.” (CBS) " I wanted them to think I was a good journalist…a good person. I wanted them to love the story so they would love me.” Stephen Glass
(CBS) Stephen Glass, the young Washington writer whose often-outrageous articles proved, in the end, to be rarely true, tells Correspondent Steve Kroft that he piled lie on top of lie to gain the admiration of his colleagues.
Glass, who has written a novel about his life called “The Fabulist,” appears in his first interview on 60 Minutes Sunday, May 11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
“I loved the electricity of people liking my stories,” he told Kroft in his first public appearance since being fired in 1998 by The New Republic magazine.
“I wanted them to think I was a good journalist…a good person. I wanted them to love the story so they would love me,” says Glass, who also wrote for Harper’s, Rolling Stone and George.
Glass says a quest for perfection led him down the road to perdition. “I remember thinking, ‘If I just had the exact quote that I wanted to make it work, it would be perfect,’” he told Kroft, “and I wrote something…and I let it stand and then it ran in the magazine and I saw it and I said to myself what I said every time these stories ran, ‘You must stop.’ But I didn’t.”
Glass told Kroft that “very few” of the dozens of articles he wrote for The New Republic, his employer for over two years, had no fabricated material in them.
Some of the more egregious examples include a piece about a group of young conservatives meeting at a convention, about whom he concocted a story in which they lure a woman to a hotel room and sexually embarrass her. In another, he attacked a presidential advisor. “There was a piece about Vernon Jordan which contained some of the worst fabrications I wrote. I said that he had behaved lecherously towards young women,” said Glass.
But the heart of Glass’ deception was usually an invented character. “And the strength of those stories often was…that I could find quirky…mean…crazy…brilliant people, but all people who didn’t exist, to say what they needed to say…for the piece to work,” he told Kroft.
Instead of raising questions, the incredible tales seemed to raise his profile and believability, says his former New Republic editor, Charles Lane.
“As each outlandish story seemed to pass muster, the next time he came up with something outlandish, you said, ‘That’s just a Steve Glass story,’” said Lane, who now works at The Washington Post.
The stories passed muster because Glass had worked in The New Republic’s fact-checking department. “I knew how the system worked…I invented fake notes…voice mailboxes…business cards…a Web site,” he told Kroft. “For every lie I told in the magazine, there was a series of lies behind that lie that I told,” said Glass.
“This was a very elaborate con. This was not just a vivid imagination gone wild in the name of ambition,” says The New Republic editor, Leon Wieseltier. “This was a very, very complicated deception,” he told Kroft.
Glass now claims to be repentant. He hopes to be a lawyer soon but must first pass a character assessment. “This is the very beginning of a very, very long process of apologies. I didn’t apologize to people because I was so ashamed,” he told Kroft..
Lied to many times by Glass, Wieseltier isn’t buying it. “What you’re covering now is contrition as a career move. If Steve Glass is sorry…he should have called the people he betrayed.”
©MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Now Hewitt is resurrecting Glass who is a liberal hitman, a fraud, a liar and a recent law school graduate. Funny how that fits together.....liar, fraud, and lawyer doesn't it? And guess what? This cultural zero Glass with the law degree is looking to be admitted to the New York Bar. Oh, and there's also a movie coming out about Glass.
This creep's a triple threat.
Sounds like a perfect fit to me.
Scumbag Glass stinks to high heaven. Creep-o couldn't get a job hauling garbage.
That this lowlife got a law degreee is horrific enough. If NY admits him to the bar they are no better than Arthur Andersen and others that cooked books to defraud.
Can you imagine someone actually hiring this pathological liar to represent them?
Sure, "some" people would.....like POC Hewitt and the 60 Minutes aiders and abettors who tried to resurrect the lying lowlife.
Liberals turds are scum. They lie because they have an unmitigated contempt for the rest of us.
Has anyone else noticed that apparently each and every prominent case of plagiarism and fabrication in the past two decades has involved liberals? Is this because they have become so inured to shading the truth that they lose sight of the distinction between shading and outright fabrication. (Plagiarism is a form of lying as well.) Liberalism requires so many intellectual contortions and so much self-deception, that one loses ones orientation with the cold world of truth and verifiable reality.
Excellent insight. You nailed it. The NY Slimes, and other liberal rags, need to ponder your words morning, noon and night.
Oh, yeah, the smug little cream puff woulda whined, " Oh, Mommy, hit me again, please."
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