Free Republic

Hamilton Fish, the president and publisher of The New Republic, is taking a leave of absence pending an investigation into complaints by female employees at the magazine, according to a letter sent to its staff on Sunday night. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/business/media/new-republic-hamilton-fish.html

<p>NEW YORK (AP) -- Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, two young journalists notorious for fabricating stories, have something else in common: Both have written highly publicized books that few people are buying.</p> <p>Blair, a former New York Times reporter, received a six-figure advance for "Burning Down My Master's House." Published March 6, the book had an announced first printing of 250,000 and plenty of media coverage, including author interviews with Katie Couric on NBC and Larry King on CNN.</p>

One day in January 1996, I sat in Steve Glass's apartment following the returns to the New Hampshire primary with him and one or two other colleagues of ours at The New Republic. We were watching a C-SPAN call-in show, and Glass began speculating about how callers can get on the air. Glass picked up the phone and called the number, and said he lived in Manchester. His status as an apparent bonafide New Hampshirite thrust him to the front of the line--within seconds he was talking to the host. His immediate success flustered him. Asked whom he had voted...

"Let's see if your lies match up with your partner's lies." That trademark line, uttered by NYPD Blue's "Det. Andy Sipowicz" (Dennis Franz) to one or another suspect about to be interrogated, would be a fitting opening for the interrogation of any number of New York Times reporters and editors. But if I had my pick of TV detectives to grill the mopes at the Times, I'd call "Det. Frank Pembleton" (Andre Braugher) of the late series Homicide: Life on the Streets, up from Baltimore. Pembleton, a master interrogator and avenging angel ("We speak for the dead"), is particularly adept...

The same week that The New York Times admitted that one of its reporters, Jayson Blair, made up or plagiarized some 36 news stories (see p. 5), another disgraced journalist published a novel about how he made up the news. The novel, The Fabulist, by Stephen Glass, demonstrates how the underlying problem in America's newsrooms is their worldview. Mr. Glass was a 25-year-old wunderkind writing for The New Republic, once the nation's liberal journal of record (though it now sometimes surprises with an occasional hip neo-conservative position). He once wrote an article, "Peddling Poppy" (June 9, 1997), in which he...

Don't call them liars, thieves, rogues, scoundrels, scalawags, blackguard, cads or creeps. Call them authors. In what seems to be an inevitable development these days, former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair is writing a book to capitalize on his sudden fame — or infamy, if indeed the distinction still exists. The news about Blair's literary ambitions comes on the heels of the publication of "The Fabulist," Stephen Glass' fictional (wink-wink) account of how he fooled The New Republic and other publications with phony stories.

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...