Has there ever been such an embarrassing moment for the craft of reporting? Bookstores are about to start selling The Fabulist, a novel in which Stephen Glass, who disgraced the New Republic five years ago by falsifying some 27 magazine articles, depicts a young man, also named Stephen, who re-enacts Glass's mischief at a weekly much like the New Republic. Now the revival of that scandal has been overshadowed by the discovery that a 27-year-old staff reporter on The New York Times, Jayson Blair, manufactured at least three dozen fake stories, even though several of his superiors knew he was...