WE'RE SO PROUD OF WE:

Balls of Glass: The New Republic has no shame. (Mugger, 11/24/03, NY Press)

A few thoughts struck me while watching Shattered Glass. One, as an artistic achievement, it’s the Yanks’ Enrique Wilson, as compared to Gentleman’s Agreement or All the President’s Men taking on a Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays role. Second, the self-aggrandizement of the New Republic itself continues to be fairly repulsive; not only has the magazine advertised Shattered Glass constantly on its website, but the film’s conclusion, in which Lane is portrayed as a ticker-tape-parade-worthy hero for firing Glass, is just silly. It’s not as if the Glass saga at the weekly–Lane found out that nearly 30 of his articles were made up–was something to brag about. And the magazine’s Nov. 10 cover has a picture of Glass to accompany Jonathan Chait’s story "What the Media Can Learn from Stephen Glass: And What It Can’t."

Talk about making lemonade out of rotten lemons.

In addition, there were two galling factual inaccuracies in the film. When then-proprietor Marty Peretz (he now owns a third of TNR) fires Lane’s predecessor, the late Michael Kelly, it’s not mentioned even in passing that the bombastic Peretz canned one of the most influential journalists of the past generation because Kelly was unrelenting in his criticism, within TNR’s pages, of the magazine’s pet Al Gore. Also, gladiator Lane (who was a paid consultant for the film) is identified at the end as simply now working for the Washington Post, when in fact he, too, was let go by Peretz in 1999, in favor of Peter Beinart.

(Beinart, actually, after a rocky start, has emerged as a talented editor, producing a mostly liberal magazine that nonetheless is eclectic enough to attract readers who can’t abide doctrinaire Bush-is-a-moron competitors such as the American Prospect, the Nation and the Washington Monthly.)

Most obviously, that Shattered Glass could even be made–and that book publisher Simon & Schuster would pay real money to Stephen Glass to write a silly novel called The Fabulist, released last May–is an enormous statement about pop culture (of which the media’s an integral cog) today. Can anyone imagine that in 1981, after Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke had a Pulitzer Prize rescinded after it was revealed her winning series of stories was based on a composite character, that a movie would be made celebrating the Post’s soul-searching over the deception?

Are there really enough journalists in America to make such a film profitable? Because, who else would want to see it?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 24, 2003 10:11 PM