Listen to this story – it’s a good’un!

Up-and-coming reporter is the darling of a well-respected political magazine. One day, a rival magazine requests to do a follow-up on a recent story by the young star, but they are having a few problems verifying some facts in said story. Asked to account for this, young star provides phone numbers – which lead to voicemails. He provides the URL of a corporate website – on AOL’s members area. He provides an email address for a teenager – on holiday in early May. As things tumble around his ears, it turns out that 27 of the 41 stories written for this well-respected magazine have been partly or fully made up.
Fabricated.
Pulled out of the air.

This story. Fact or fiction?

Actually, both.

Shattered Glass is a film starring Hayden Christensen (of Anniken Skywalker fame) who plays the real-life journalist who lives a Walter Mitty-like existence, making up fabulous stories to entertain his co-workers and his readers alike, and to feed his own ego. In 1998, Stephen Glass was a young, but respected journalist at Washington’s New Statesman, a political magazine known for ripping its competition to shreds. He was able to slip by the fact-checkers at the magazine because they had made the fatal mistake of first hiring him as such a person, enabling him to understand how to get around the rigorous process of checking and re-checking all facts before print.

And now, being completely discredited as a journalist, how does he spend his time? He’s recently published a book, called The Fabulist, about… you guessed it! A journalist working for a respectable magazine who makes up the majority of his stories. He’s also used the intervening 5 years to earn a law degree from Georgetown University, although according to a 60 Minutes interview, there is some difficulty with him being admitted to the bar in New York – something about his character and his fitness to practise law??

Although the film wasn’t an earth-shatteringly good production, I was enthralled throughout because the story is just so unbelievable. All the way through you feel that this is the moment when he’s going to be caught, this is the moment when his co-workers will see through his lies, but again and again they give him the benefit of the doubt. And although Hayden Christensen was (in my opinion), somewhat wooden in Star Wars, he is quite convincing as Mr. Glass, who uses the fact that he is the youngest member of the staff (and therefore the most vulnerable and in need of protection) to great advantage. He actually cried on the shoulders of his fellow writers and editors, people who he was duping in order to feed his own fame.

I’d see it again – just to track through his lies and marvel at the sheer cojones of someone who is willing to sacrifice his career, and those of his colleagues, in order to get a story.

The Fabulist