The New York Times Scandal Recalls Glass Episode (original) (raw)

The current scandal embroiling The New York Times and the fabrications of Jayson Blair, a young reporter assigned to its National Desk, have drawn inevitable comparisons to the case of Stephen Glass.

Back in the spring of 1998, Glass was an associate editor at The New Republic and a nationally recognized up-and-coming journalist, having contributed pieces to Harper's Magazine, Slate and Rolling Stone. But one of his stories, "Hack Heaven," caught the eye of one of Forbes.com's staff reporters, Adam Penenberg, as being too good to be true.

The piece, which supposedly detailed the exploits of a 15-year-old hacker blackmailing a software company by the unlikely name of Jukt Micronics, was pure fiction. Penenberg and then-Managing Editor Kambiz Foroohar were able to prove, among other things, that Jukt Micronics didn't exist and neither did the hacker. The New Republic subsequently fired Glass and fabrications were eventually found, or suspected, in a large portion of his work.

The discovery was a major scoop for our fledgling Web site, which had only begun publishing original online content a year earlier, in May 1997. The resulting pieces went a long way towards establishing the legitimacy of what was then deemed "new media," which many "old media" types ironically suspected of being riddled with errors.

Glass has recently published an appropriately titled novel, The Fabulist. Between that event and the ongoing Times revelations, we felt we should package together our old stories on Stephen Glass in one convenient place. There is also a link to Senior News Editor Mark Lewis' Stephen Ambrose coverage, which traced incidents of plagiarism back to the beginning of the late historian's career. --Michael Noer

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