Today (yesterday, by the time I finished this post) I finally got around to watching this movie on the big tv. I hadn't thought of this until just earlier today, but it could have been possible that the dvd I had wasn't in good condition (scratched or otherwise damaged) and that I wouldn't be able to watch the movie. Thankfully, that was not the case. I probably should have checked in the store to make sure the dvd wasn't scratched, but it just didn't come to mind then.
Anyways, here are some thoughts that came to mind the second time around.
Firstly, in comparison to the other two journalism movies I've seen, this one was not about journalists trying to uncover the misdeeds of others, this one had to do with internal issues at a magazine - a reporter who makes things up that end up being published as fact. So that makes this movie a bit different.
Secondly, I (again) wonder about the motivations of the guy who made up all the things. The movie doesn't really make an attempt to explain that, and I guess the only person who can explain it completely is Stephen Glass himself. I'm not sure if he's ever done so. Apparently (this is mentioned in some screens of text at the end of the movie) he later wrote a book about a journalist who did the same things he did (presumably based on himself), so it would be interesting to read that and see if it would offer any insights. It would also be interesting to read some of the original articles that he wrote (made up) for The New Republic.
In my search for the original fabricated articles, I did come across the original article in Forbes that exposed the fabrications.
This is a 2014 article/interview of Glass, written by a former colleague/friend of his that mentions a couple of little details ("It was the spring of 1998 and he was still just my hapless friend Steve, who padded into my office ten times a day in white socks and was more interested in alphabetizing beer than drinking it.") seen in the film although I don't remember them being mentioned in the Vanity Fair article that the movie was based off of. There is an image of one of the pages of one of the original articles, after it had been reviewed and annotated for false information. There are also images of one of his business cards from when he worked there, and a page out of one of his notebooks, where he wrote things like (to the best of my attempts at deciphering his scribbly handwriting): "Don't do stupid things," "'What a jerk and [illegible - could be 'often'?"] had impressions to make,"You'll be a member's assistant, not the asst. member," "You need them far much more than they need you," "Don't work for the enemy - EVER!!", "Return all calls, immediately", "Don't get discouraged", and finally, "She said she knew Sen. Graham [my reading of that name may be incorrect] personally If she did why was she seeing me? Because she didn't. Bitch." That last one puzzles me, for sure. It also makes me wonder what, theoretically, people would think if they happened to get ahold of and read my personal notes to myself that I write down. I'm sure it's possible they'd find some of it puzzling to them. It would certainly be interesting to see the rest of the pages from that notebook, for that matter. The question that I have now is why didn't he just become an author? A novelist or something where he could write things regardless of how factual/made up they were.
I also liked this quote from the article: "He was floaty back then, undetermined, as if he could levitate in those white socks."
In this article, it says that he didn't keep in touch with the people he had worked with at The New Republic after the scandal was exposed. My impression from the article is that some (all/most?) of the motivation behind his behavior was that he wanted to impress the people he worked with and he wanted them to like him. I don't perceive a particularly malicious intent behind the lies that he put into his stories. However, from what I've read, it seems that the people he worked with resented/didn't trust him in the years after the scandal. Their opinions may have changed by 2017 but from what I read, they didn't have particularly positive things to say about him. Which I somewhat understand - he manipulated, you could say, and lied to them, and I can see how that would antagonize his colleagues and be hard for them to forgive. But again, I don't think he had inherently bad motivations for the lying and fabrications. That's just my take on it; I understand how people (especially people who worked with him firsthand) could think differently. The same person who wrote the 2014 article also wrote a review entitled "Glass Houses/Remembering the fall of Stephen Glass" for Slate in 2003.
Upon further research, I came across an LA Times article that links to a portion of a fabricated story published in Harper's Magazine about a phone service psychic. Despite the fact that the highlighted portions in that story were fake, he did have a nice writing style. In the early 2000s, after the scandal, Glass attempted to become a lawyer but he was not approved for a law license. Apparently, this year (2017) he will be able to try again. This 2011 article from CNN I think is fairly insightful into his motivations - it has a number of quotes from him. In some ways the things that he did make me think of Munchausen Syndrome, although that is about people who pretend to have illnesses in order to get attention/sympathy, so not quite the same thing. But similar, a bit.
Also in the course of reading up about the true events/people that the movie was based on, I came across this review from Slate that describes the movie as a realistic portrayal of the whole situation, from someone who witnessed it firsthand. The review was written by the husband of the woman who wrote a review of Glass' book and, 11 years later, an interview with him reflecting on the events. In this review I also learned that one of the characters in the movie is pretty much that woman, but just with a different name.
In 2003, he was on 60 Minutes in what I thought was also an insightful interview (video - the voice of Hayden Christensen in the movie, as Glass, is actually fairly similar to Glass' actual voice, which is kind of interesting). In this 2003 CNN interview, Glass describes the movie as his "own personal horror film." I still haven't been able to find any full versions of the fabricated articles he wrote. :( I think those would be interesting to read. Almost exactly 12 years ago, someone compiled a webpage with a list with links to the articles, but those links are broken as they are at least 12 years out of date. However, the guy who made the page looks like he has an email address, so if I were curious enough, maybe I could email him about it. I do appreciate that over a decade he compiled that list - it seems like something I would do (and in fact, I did recently do a similar thing). Oh wait, looks like I found a full version of the story that later caused his (Glass) demise. I still want to see at least some of the other ones. This article from Slate in 2003 has various suggestions by readers as to what they think Glass needed to do in order to repent for his journalistic sins (I really wanted to use that phrase somewhere in this post). The insights in this article claim that one of the reasons he was able to get away with his fabrications was that they played to the existing stereotypes that his colleagues and the magazine's readers had, which I thought was an interesting take.
ETA: I only just (a couple days after I started this post) got around to reading this article by a friend/coworker of Glass' at TNR. It's interesting and gives some opinion about the book Glass went on to write. According to this guy, Glass wasn't actually that good at writing and the only reason it seemed so in his articles is because they were heavily edited/rewritten by his coworkers. I guess it'll be interesting to read the book and see how the writing compares.
Edit: For some reason this did not come to mind until now - the idea to check Wikepedia, as the citations part of their pages usually has links to various source materials. So I did, and found working links to a number (but not all) of Glass' original stories (under "External links" at the end of the page). Score!! Many (I don't know if it's all) of the articles can be found on this website, which I'm very grateful to have found. I haven't gone through and read all of them yet but I'll probably do that in the next couple of days. I might make a new post commenting on those after I've read them.
Thirdly, now having seen All The President's Men, there's a famous (apparently) scene in that movie of the journalists in the Library of Congress going through papers at a table/desk, shown from above as the camera zooms out gradually. Someone else wrote an interesting little blog post of their own about it. Towards the end of Shattered Glass, after the editor has discovered Glass' fabrications, he is in the office of The New Republic looking at all the issues of the magazine displayed on a wall. He takes them down and begins to go through them in search of fabricated articles. It reminded me somewhat of the aforementioned scene in All The President's Men.
Somehow when I was looking up a picture for the part about All The President's Men, I came across this photograph, which is supposed to be a depiction of part of the book Invisible Man, which I had to read for school and did not enjoy, but regardless, this is an interesting photograph.
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